Hi, I’m Ryan

I’m an actuary at Willis Towers Watson who is currently based in New York City. I help to create data products that help businesses understand the risks they’re exposed to and evaluate the costs and benefits of different strategies for managing those risks. I’m the technical leader on our team, which means I play an advisory role across many projects helping others solve various implementation problems as well as promulgating the workflow and deployment patterns we use to create our tools.

Before joining Willis Tower Watson, I worked in more traditional actuarial roles at several different insurance companies. In all those previous positions I was drawn toward the more technical tasks and projects. I always enjoyed automating workflows with SQL and VBA, and I would often be sought out to help implement an algorithm from an actuarial paper in Excel/VBA.

In 2014, I really started to get excited about R. I blame ggplot2. There was something about the logic of grammar of graphics framework it allowed me to access that really captured my imagination. Since that time I’ve looked for more opportunities to use R in my work. Now, I’m passionate about shifting actuarial work out of the spreadsheet into scripted and reproducible code.

You can contact me on Twitter or at ryan_thomas@hey.com.