tmaterna.com
Name Thomas L.F. Materna Ph.D.
Email address thomas@tmaterna.com
Phone Number +1 (203) 858-2779
Address Will be provided upon request.
Major Accomplishments
  • Developed a measure of the richness of swaption volatilities vs. other tradable quantities, giving our volatility fund an exploitable (and exploited!) edge in the market.
  • Initiated and developed several projects aimed at improving traders productivity by giving them quick and easy access to pre-processed market data, position feedback (broken down P&L) and exposure to a broad range of market variables. I made those applications user-friendly since I know that traders are too busy to use tedious programs.
  • Saved the company from significant losses that would have occurred due to, for example, bad caption volatilities and TBA prices. I developed applications to extract data from sources like Bloomberg, Reuters and Lehman Brothers, and cross-check them before calibrating our models. Adding that skeptical (if not paranoid) attitude towards data saved us from a few potentially costly mistakes.
  • Rewrote some of the company’s libraries improving accuracy, code reusability and speed. This made many more results available throughout the day instead of overnight. It also greatly increased our productivity and ability to respond to time-critical adjustments and expansions to the existing codes.
Employment history
July 2006 - present

Vice-President - Research

in a successful Hedge Fund
2003 - July 2006

Post-Doctoral Research Scientist

1999 - 2003

Research Fellow

Education
2003

Ph.D. Nuclear Physics

2000

Diploma of Advanced Studies in Physical Sciences

1999 Bachelor's Degrees:
  • Physical Sciences, with "Grande Distinction"
  • Mathematical Sciences, with "Grande Distinction"
Languages see also my language maps .
Fluent English, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish.
Advanced Dutch (used to be fluent but needs practice).
Intermediate Italian
Basic German
Publications See the complete sortable database here.
Computer skills
  • Highly proficient in Perl, C++, Ruby/Rails, R and SQL.
  • Good knowledge but lack of recent practice in Visual Basic, Java, Java3D (see my Java3D applets), FORTRAN, JavaScript, PHP (e.g. this website).
  • Familiar with developing tools like Eclipse, subversion and programming/analysis packages like Condor High Throughput Computing and CERN's ROOT analysis framework.
  • A total of 14 years of experience in programming on both Linux/UNIX and Windows.
Computing accomplishments in past job
  • built an extensive and versatile three-dimensional Monte-Carlo simulation of beam and reaction products trajectories through magnetic fields and materials in C++. The simulation has proven to be crucial in the planning and the analysis of the BigSol experiments in the Cyclotron Institute .
  • developed a real-time data visualization tool in Visual Basic (GUI) and C++ (DLLs) to monitor the data acquisition used by the DEMON detector group. The program also automated for the first time tedious calibration tasks.
  • created with Java3D a tool allowing the design of experimental setups with specific constraints that allowed me to generate an efficient setup for the experiment I conducted for my Ph.D. project.
  • improved significantly the analysis programs used at the Cyclotron Institute , adding new features and improving modularity and code re-usability by using a better class dependency model (C++).
Scientific accomplishments
  • My Ph.D. thesis showed for the first time a measure of the fusion cross-section for superheavy systems at low energies, thanks to a new analysis algorithm I developed (THOMATE), surpassing the original expectations of the project. This allowed me to reconcile the data with a one-body dissipation.
  • I have been lead the development of the superheavy elements program at the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University. I have designed and optimized the experimental setup that will be used in further experiments as well as the entire program necessary to analyze the collected data.
  • I have also made significant contributions to experiments outside the scope of my projects, in the study of the structure of exotic light elements (10Be,5H,…) and the study of the nuclear matter equation of state at intermediate energies.

tmaterna.com  is maintained by Thomas Materna
thomas@tmaterna.com