Catherine Nelson

About Catherine Nelson

I\'m currently building something new - watch this space!I specialize in document understanding and information extraction, and I\'m passionate about turning AI capabilities into real products that solve user problems. My experience spans the full ML lifecycle, from data pipelines and production APIs to deploying Transformer models. I\'m the author of \"Software Engineering for Data Scientists\", a guide for data scientists who want to level up their coding skills, published by O\'Reilly in May 2024. Most recently, I\'ve been consulting for early-stage startups on Generative AI: developing custom evaluation pipelines for LLM applications, building production services with FastAPI, and helping teams find product-market fit for AI features. I\'m a Python expert, and I\'m embracing AI-assisted development and expanding my skills into React to build full-stack AI applications.Previously, I was a Principal Data Scientist at SAP Concur, where I took an ML-powered carbon emissions feature from initial concept to production API. I have extensive experience with NLP models from RNNs to Transformers. I\'m also co-author of \"Building Machine Learning Pipelines\", published by O\'Reilly in 2020. I\'ve given many conference talks including PyCon US, PyData Global and the Grace Hopper Conference. Before I made a career change to data science, I gained a PhD in geophysics and volcanology, and I worked as an exploration geologist in the oil industry.

Experience

1. Technical Book Author

   O\'reilly

   Jun 2019 — Present

   Authored “Software Engineering for Data Scientists” (2024), a guide for data scientists to improve their Python coding skills and implement software engineering best practices, making their code robust and reproducible- Authored “Is Building Secure ML Possible?”(2021), a review of industry and academic techniques to enhance security for ML systems- Co-authored “Building Machine Learning Pipelines” (2020), showing how to improve ML retraining and deployment processes with TensorFlow Extended.

Education

• University of Oxford

  MESci, Earth Sciences

  2002 — 2006

• Durham University

  Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Geophysics

Skills

• Petroleum Geology
• Geology
• Sedimentology
• Geophysics
• Earth Science
• Data Analysis