Patrick Lestrange

Experience

1. Lead Data Scientist

   Climate

   Dec 2021 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Technical lead developing predictive models to help farmers make planting, management, and harvest decisions. Spearheaded the implementation of MLOps best practices and trained data scientists how to develop production-ready machine learning models- Developed a model to predict the optimal corn seeding rate based on a field’s soil characteristics and the planted seed’s genetics. Deployed as a synchronous endpoint used by internal teams for agronomic research and by customers to make yearly planting decisions- Refactored and deployed an Operations Research project which determines which seed products will yield the most on a farmer’s field and how to optimize harvesting operations. This work reduced technical debt and cut experiment runtime from several weeks to less than a day. Runtime in production was also 30x faster- Developed and automated the execution of a model which predicts a plant\'s susceptibility to various diseases using its genetic markers. Its predictions are used as features in other machine learning models- Leads the “Code Quality & Lifecycle” team which establishes software and ML model development best practices throughout the Data Science department- Created a Git repository template to standardize code structure for model and general python package development. Now required for any team developing production-ready code- Develops and leads training sessions to teach data scientists how to structure codebases, write unit tests, automate data pipelines & model training workflows, and maintain models in production- Created and maintained an internal Python package used company-wide to automate the creation and documentation of tables in Google BigQuery through CI/CD pipelines- Worked as a SAFE Agile scrum master, managing stand-ups, backlog curation, and sprint retrospectives.

Education

• University of Washington

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemistry

  2012 — 2017

• York College of Pennsylvania

  Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Chemistry

  2008 — 2012