Derek Alexander
Principal AI Engineer at Mayo Clinic
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolDerek Alexander is a Principal AI Engineer based in San Diego with over a decade of experience designing and deploying reproducible, equitable, and explainable AI for healthcare. He bridges deep research—multimodal, transfer, reinforcement, and federated learning—with rigorous statistical foundations in graph theory, causal modeling, and Bayesian inference. Derek has led diverse teams to build scalable, secure cloud-native systems at organizations from academic labs to Amazon and Mayo Clinic, shepherding models from prototype to production. He emphasizes auditability and best-practice software engineering alongside novel model research, ensuring clinical applicability and compliance. A PhD-trained cognitive neuroscientist with a philosophy undergraduate background, he combines quantitative rigor with a habit of questioning assumptions—“there are no facts, only interpretations”—to surface hidden biases and failure modes.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Cognitive Neuroscience and Applied Statistical Modeling, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Cognitive Neuroscience and Applied Statistical Modeling at The University of Texas at AustinB.A. Philosophy Minor in Mathematics, B.A. Philosophy Minor in Mathematics at University of Virginia
English, Spanish
Github Skills (149)
graph-algorithms10
dataflow10
tractography10
python10
feature-extraction10
network-analysis10
topological-data-analysis10
bids10
batch-size10
graph-visualization10
spatial10
medical-imaging10
complex-networks10
medical10
optimization10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
brainlife/app-pynets
Sep 2020 - Apr 2022
A Reproducible post-processing workflow for Structural and Functional Connectome Ensemble Learning. PyNets leverages Nilearn and Dipy fMRI and dMRI libraries to specify any of a variety of methodological choices and sampling individual structural and functional connectome estimates. See https://pynets.readthedocs.io/
Contributions:36 PRs, 197 pushes, 5 branches in 1 year 7 months
connectomepythondmriensemblechoices
dPys/PyNets
Jun 2018 - Jul 2022
A Reproducible Workflow for Structural and Functional Connectome Ensemble Learning
Contributions:3 releases, 15 reviews, 426 commits in 4 years 1 month
connectomeneurosciencedmrigridsearchensemble
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