Summary
Nan D is a Staff Research Scientist at Meta with 11 years of experience building large-scale recommender and ranking systems for Facebook Marketplace, blending production C++ backend engineering with ML modeling in PyTorch and LightGBM. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University and previously developed scalable algorithms for correcting noisy long-read sequencing data using HMMs and graph consensus, demonstrating a rare crossover between bioinformatics and industrial recommender systems. A top-ranked Kaggle Competitions Master with multiple gold finishes in diverse tasks (NLP, CV, and tabular prediction), he brings strong feature engineering instincts and a track record of turning research ideas into deployable systems. Based in San Francisco, Nan is effective at bridging research and product teams to improve feed relevance at scale while retaining deep algorithmic rigor from his physics and computational biology background.
11 years of coding experience