Evan Ochsner
Scientist. Builder. As a Physics Ph.D. I helped discover gravitational waves. I spent 8 years at Amazon launching cybersecurity products like Detective and the new Security Hub. I work on hard problems with messy data and ship real results.
About
I studied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Chicago, followed by a Physics Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. I studied gravitational-wave theory and data analysis for LIGO: post-Newtonian theory, matched-filter search pipelines, co-leading one of the flagship searches (the S5 search for "high mass" binary black holes).
About five years later, after LIGO upgraded to Advanced LIGO, the O1 high mass search made the first direct detection of gravitational waves. I am proud that my research and code directly contributed to this gargantuan task in their small way.
After the discovery, I pivoted to cybersecurity at Sqrrl, a Boston startup spun out of NSA threat-hunting work, where I built detection algorithms and graph models on real customer data at enterprise scale. Sqrrl was acquired by Amazon, and I stayed on for eight years as an applied scientist — one of four scientists who launched Amazon Detective, then working in the Security Analytics and AI Research (SAAR) team as lead scientist on major Detective feature additions and the relaunch of AWS Security Hub.
Currently searching for my next problem to tackle. If you have one, reach out on LinkedIn.
Projects
Transformers: A Guided Tour
Transformers are likely to be the defining technology of our time. This is my attempt to understand how they work, explain it to a general audience, and frame it in a novel way that's interesting to experts. Easy.
Heavy on metaphor and interactive visualizations, let's build a mental model for what transformers are actually doing.
ToolkitPersonal Advocacy Toolkit
Do the legwork so whoever helps you can actually help you.
For people getting stonewalled by an insurer, a provider, a landlord, a debt collector. Evidence intake with forensic integrity, drafting tools with anti-hallucination guard rails, a publication-safety pipeline.
DataU.S. Insurance Complaint Data
Normalized complaint and litigation rate data from 20+ state insurance regulators, with an interactive multi-state viewer for cross-state comparisons and trend analysis.