Thurston Powers

• Designing, deploying, and maintaining ETL pipelines for all state legislation, laws, regulations and federal legislation, laws, statutes, regulations, proposed rules, and other text sources
• Architecting, optimizing, and maintaining relational, NoSQL, graph, and vector databases with high availability and performance
• Creating next generation search engines that allow users to create, fine-tune, and save their search parameters for document similarity, conceptual similarity, and soon hierarchical search
• Building simple, easy to use APIs that allow our frontend and developers to create user friendly interfaces to our search engines and data
• Using AI throughout the process like salt in cooking - the just enough to elevate the dish and not a speck more

• Leading engineering efforts in developing AI-powered search and data processing systems
• Architecting scalable solutions for legislative and regulatory data management
• Implementing advanced search algorithms and vector database technologies
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver high-performance APIs and user interfaces
• Optimizing AI integration to enhance data processing and search capabilities

• Leading a fantastic team of engineers in the development of AI powered tools and services
• Utilizing Claude3, GPT3.5-4, and Gemini to create enjoyable, interactive experiences with scholarly works via RAGs, to automate daily search intensive tasks, and to synthesize new data like extracting key topics from transcripts
• Architecting and managing our cloud infrastructure in AWS
• Designing databases, pipelines, APIs, chatbots, and applications

• Designing, maintaining, and optimizing relational databases
• Developing data pipelines from web scrapers, through QA processes, across databases, and to a publicly accessible API
• Architecting and building cloud based solutions, such as event driven pipelines
• Presenting data to internal and external audiences using BI tools to communicate key findings, identify likely data integrity issues, and creating dashboards that allow users to explore data associated with various projects

• Creating interactive data visualization products for QuantGov
• Developing programs and data analyses associated with the QuantGov mission, such as State RegData
• Assisting the Policy Analytics Team with research and writing blogs, op-eds, and publications

• Planned and managed annual publications
• Authored and coauthored studies, briefs, op-eds, and providing testimony on tax and fiscal issues in the North East
• Assisted with tax and fiscal task force events and organization

• Authored and coauthored studies, briefs, op-eds, and providing testimony on tax and fiscal issues in the North East
• Responsible for legislative outreach and support in the North East
• Assisted with tax and fiscal task force events and organization

• Responsible for authoring and coauthoring government finance studies, publishing op-eds and policy briefs, conducting independent research, and assisting the Director of Policy with her areas of research
• Collected, organized, and visualized descriptive and inferential statistics ranging from displaying linear trends to conducting fixed effect panel analyses using tables joined from various databases
• Assisted in the organization and operation of private and public events such as the Milford Oyster festival

Master's Degree in Public Policy

Public Economics and Finance, Debt Financing and Management, Multiple Regression, Estimating Impact in Policy Research, Large Scale Data Analysis I&II, Data Visualization & Presentation