Kara Ponder
Manager, AI Research at Charles Schwab
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKara Ponder is a Manager of AI Research in San Francisco who turns complex scientific and commercial data into practical AI products for finance and biotech. With 11 years of experience spanning astrophysics to enterprise AI, she has led teams that shipped agentic AI tools, text-to-SQL chatbots, and productionized demand-forecasting pipelines that improved accuracy by up to 40%. Her Ph.D. in Physics and postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and SLAC underpin deep expertise in ML for time-domain astronomy and large-scale data pipelines, which she has translated into investor-facing signals and due-diligence systems at a biotech VC. She combines hands-on model engineering and MLOps with product vision—mentoring engineers while aligning cross-functional roadmaps to investor workflows. Notably, she has moved cutting-edge transformer and reconciliation techniques from cosmology research into commercial forecasting and extraction products. Reach out for an up-to-date CV or to discuss AI strategy in financial services and life sciences.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
University of GeorgiaDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Physics at University of Pittsburgh
Github Skills (31)
probabilistic7
classification7
python6
catalog6
astronomy6
data-analysis5
data-visualization5
telescope5
allocation5
energy5
matplotlib5
cosmology5
visualization5
recommendation-system5
science4
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
kponder/kponder.github.io
Oct 2016 - Jul 2024
Contributions:130 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years 10 months
kponder/PyUNITY
Jan 2016 - Nov 2016
Contributions:8 commits, 5 pushes, 1 branch in 10 months
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