Richard Downe

Sr. Director, Data Science Loblaw

Richard earned his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iowa in 2013, where he cut his teeth on messy data sets building models of coronary artery disease. He comes to Loblaw Digital after 4 years in Silicon Valley, helping early stage startups bootstrap their data science operations in domains including law and medicine, and while he’s a relative newcomer to retail, he’s no stranger to large complex problems. At Loblaw Digital, he’s working to apply modern software development practices, like continuous integration and deployment, to the data science world, and in the process accelerating the team’s ability to rapidly iterate on ML solutions to difficult problems ranging from personalization to forecasting.  He and his team are pushing Loblaw’s to be leaders in the Canadian eCommerce space as they drive customer-centric solutions that make their customers’ lives easier.