Ryan Barrett is VP of Credit Risk & Data Science and head of lease underwriting at Acima Credit, where he employs machine learning algorithms in SAS, R, and Python to large, structurally complex databases to determine customer credit worthiness using traditional (e.g. FICO, Vantage, non-prime consumer credit reports) and non-traditional data sources (e.g. online presence, magazine preferences, email footprint). He began his career in healthcare performing research for the small, Salt Lake City-based company the Institute for Clinical Outcomes Research (ICOR). His areas of focus included traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, geriatric care, and stroke where he has published several papers. He transitioned to the financial sector in late 2014 working briefly at Zion’s Bank on their small business loans team before being hired on as Acima Credit’s senior data scientist, and later Director of Credit Risk & Data Science. He is currently VP of Credit & Data Science. He has over 10 years of extensive experience in SAS and SQL, and multiple years of R and Python. He possesses intricate knowledge of a vast array of classical and modern machine learning techniques including logistic and linear regression, Cox proportional hazards models, Random Forest, support vector machine, K-nearest neighbors, and neural nets. Ryan received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and his masters degree in statistics from the University of Utah.