Witad Awards 2021: Data science professional of the year—Lory Nunez, JP Morgan

For some, the term “diversity” refers to company schemes to deliver a more balanced workforce and ensure greater opportunities for advancement. For Lory Nunez, the term could sum up her entire career path leading to her current role as senior data scientist in JP Morgan’s Wealth Management Technology group.

Born in the Philippines, Nunez graduated with a bachelor’s degree in math, then began law school. Two years in, having already worked as a telecoms engineer, she needed a job to pay the bills, and dropped out to take a job as research assistant to a genetic programming expert who was building a hedge fund called Investment Science Corporation. Her thesis was in artificial intelligence (AI), but the challenge wasn’t just the complexity of the subject matter; it was building the compute resources to perform that analysis from scratch more than 15 years ago.

“Then, the barrier to entry was high. Infrastructure was expensive, programming languages were cumbersome, and there weren’t libraries. We just had our laptops. Now I can spin up something in the cloud, but then we had to implement everything from scratch,” Nunez says. However, it taught her a valuable lesson: “Never be afraid to learn, and don’t be intimidated by difficult topics.”

After that, she worked at news aggregator Acquire Media, on data infrastructure at Sony Music, and was data lead at a stealth startup, working on AI, machine learning, and natural-language processing, but as “engineer one” was the person tasked with building everything technology-related from scratch.

“To me, data science is an interdisciplinary field—you have to learn and cull knowledge from many different fields,” she says.

In 2017, she joined JP Morgan, which was expanding its AI capabilities, taking responsibility for the global wealth management technology group—incorporating mortgages, credit, and compliance—as well as direct oversight of its trust and estates business. There, she led development of the Trust and Estates taxonomy and Document Digitization Platform (Tessa), a patented platform that digitizes and extracts data from trust documents—some of which could be decades old and hundreds of pages long—saving days of manual work while reducing errors.

Inside JP Morgan—where she says “diversity and inclusion is a priority from top to bottom”—she participates in the bank’s Take IT Forward initiative, which comprises around 11,000 women working in technology roles. Outside of work, Nunez participates in women-led technology groups as a speaker and mentor. But she says more still needs to be done to retain women in these roles.