Willow Turner
Senior Data Scientist
Ferndale, Michigan, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWillow Turner is a Senior Data Scientist with 11 years of multidisciplinary experience building production ML and perception systems for automotive and industrial applications. With a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford, Willow bridges deep technical research and hands-on engineering—designing and training state-of-the-art models for 3D/2D detection, dense depth, and NLP/CV pipelines while owning sensor integration and dataset quality. They have held senior and staff roles at DeepScale, Doxel, and Woven by Toyota, and led ML teams that moved prototypes into deployed systems. Willow’s background includes embedded and control work on UAVs and hardware-in-the-loop autonomous driving tests, giving uncommon end-to-end insight from sensors to models to vehicle validation. An active contributor to open-source parsing work, they’ve improved reliability and test coverage for a popular CommonMark parser, reflecting a habit of hardening core infrastructure. Based in Ferndale, Michigan, Willow combines rigorous academic training with pragmatic product delivery across research and engineering contexts.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Physics and Honors Math, BS, Physics and Honors Math at University of MichiganUniversity of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignPh.D., Applied Physics, Ph.D., Applied Physics at Stanford University
Github Skills (11)
parserator10
markdown10
parser10
rust10
markdown-it10
commonmark10
data-structure9
algorithm9
data-structures9
algorithms9
testing8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
pulldown-cmark/pulldown-cmark
Aug 2017 - Sep 2017
An efficient, reliable parser for CommonMark, a standard dialect of Markdown
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:72 commits, 6 PRs, 9 comments in 17 days
Contributions summary:Willow primarily focused on developing the CommonMark parser, a backend task. Their commits added parsing for several features, including thematic breaks, ATX headers, setext headers, and indented and fenced code blocks. They made significant improvements by refactoring the parsing code into separate functions and adding blank line handling. The user's work increased the number of passing tests, demonstrating a focus on improving parser functionality and reliability.
commonmarkmarkdownparserrust
petosegan/rust_voronoi
Sep 2017 - May 2018
Rust implementation of Fortune's algorithm for generating Voronoi diagrams
Contributions:56 commits, 3 PRs, 16 pushes in 7 months
rustvoronoicomputational-geometryfortune-algorithm
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