Tristan Ballard
Senior Research Scientist at Zeus AI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTristan Ballard is a Senior Research Scientist and statistician with nine years of experience building generative and agentic AI for weather, seasonal, and climate forecasting, translating scientific advances into commercial risk products for insurance, finance, and supply chains. His work—published in Science, PNAS, and top ML venues like NeurIPS and ICLR—combines deep learning, probabilistic modeling, and large-scale geospatial processing to produce operational, patented systems that outperform conventional models. He has a track record of productizing research (including an 8x super-resolution wildfire model and a GAN-based climate forecast that beat NASA) and helped scale Sust Global to acquisition before joining Zeus AI to lead multimodal foundation models. Equally at home in Python, PyTorch, and JAX on cloud-scale infrastructure, Tristan brings both rigorous academic training (PhD and MS from Stanford) and hands-on engineering to close the gap between climate science and actionable business insight. An understated but consistent thread in his career is turning complex physical and statistical problems into explainable, deployable solutions that directly reduce real-world risk.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Statistics, Bachelor of Science (BS) Statistics at Duke UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Systems Science, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Systems Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (42)
rasterize7
buffer6
opcodes5
extraction5
origami4
group-policy4
transformation4
data-mesh4
data-storage4
python4
spatial4
prebuild3
renewable-energy3
compression3
scylla3
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
tristanballard/N_trend_attribution
Sep 2018 - Mar 2021
Contributions:9 commits, 7 pushes, 3 branches in 2 years 5 months
tristanballard/starter-academic
Jun 2021 - Jul 2021
Contributions:120 pushes, 1 branch in 22 days
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