Nicholas Walker
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Walker is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with a Ph.D. in physics and over a decade of experience applying ML to scientific problems and production systems. He blends deep academic expertise in unsupervised representation learning and generative models (VAEs, InfoGANs) with hands-on NLP work—training custom BERTs and building RAG and extraction systems using GPT-family models for materials science. His career spans postdoctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley Lab to applied ML roles in fintech and consulting, where he’s shipped one-shot information extraction, SFT/DPO alignment with Llama-2, and domain-specific retrieval pipelines. Equally comfortable with physics-driven model design and practical deployment, he has a track record of turning complex scientific text and simulated data into structured, usable insights.
11 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS Majors in Physics and Mathematics Minor in Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS Majors in Physics and Mathematics Minor in Computer Science at Saint Louis UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Physics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Physics at Louisiana State University
Github Skills (5)
nlp8
natural-language-processing7
pytorch7
transformers6
bert6
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
walkernr/neuralMelting
May 2018 - Nov 2019
Contributions:559 commits, 2 PRs, 551 pushes in 1 year 5 months
CederGroupHub/MatBERT_NER
Jan 2021 - Jan 2022
General training framework for NER models on MatBERT
Contributions:1 release, 443 commits, 16 PRs in 1 year
pytorchnlptransformersnerbert
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