Christopher Ariza
Partner, Chief Technology Officer at Research Affiliates
Lake Forest, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Ariza is a technology executive and partner serving as CTO at Research Affiliates, where he directs Data, Investment, Enterprise Systems and IT while shaping firm-wide engineering strategy for a global leader in smart-beta and factor investing. With over 16 years in the industry and more than 20 years of software engineering experience overall, he has translated academic rigor from a PhD in music composition into robust quantitative finance tooling primarily built in Python. His background includes academic appointments at MIT and Towson and editorial work for the Computer Music Journal, reflecting an unusual blend of computational musicology and production-grade systems design. An active open-source contributor, he improved performance and MusicXML/MIDI handling in the widely used music21 toolkit, underscoring his attention to both algorithmic detail and practical interoperability. Based in Lake Forest, California, he combines research-driven thinking with operational leadership to deliver scalable, auditable investment systems.
16 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Music Composition, PhD, Music Composition at New York UniversityAB, Music, AB, Music at Harvard University
Stackoverflow
149reputation
41kreached
2answers
2questions
Github Skills (9)
midi10
midi-instrument10
music-theory10
musicxml10
python10
procedural6
memory-leaks6
generative6
doctest6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
cuthbertLab/music21
Nov 2009 - Jun 2012
music21 is a Toolkit for Computational Musicology
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1814 commits in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Christopher contributed to the music21 Toolkit for Computational Musicology project by implementing optimizations to the core `stream.py` module, which improved the performance of music output generation. The user also worked on musicxml translations, adding support for new musicxml features and features such as lyrics, time signature management, and other expression output features. Further, the user worked to add and test code that supported import and exporting of MIDI data through the music21 system.
dtwpythonmusicologymusic21music
static-frame/arraykit
Jun 2020 - Feb 2023
Python C Extensions for StaticFrame
Contributions:52 releases, 44 reviews, 571 commits in 2 years 8 months
pythonc-python-extensionsextensionspython3c-extensions
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