Josh Woodruff

Josh serves as Optimized Financial System’s President and Modeling Director. In this position, he continues the work that he started in IBM’s Industry Solutions Group and furthers the work on various solutions provided for banking and finance. For IBM, Josh visited financial hubs and worked with clients on designing optimization applications. Josh’s previous position was in Morgan Stanley’s Equity Risk Management group in New York and Brazil. His experience in this role led him to focus on financial applications for optimization.

Prior to 2010, Josh again worked for IBM in their Application, Integration and Middleware Division in both the US and Latin America. Josh built cash management, logistics, and insurance optimization models. He also worked on business rules projects for the IBM technical and business partner sales force to use as a basis for client proof of concept projects. He came to IBM through IBM’s acquisition of ILOG. For ILOG, Josh worked as a Business Policy Analyst and an Optimization Consultant. His career started in Silicon Valley with several start-ups. His passion is in bringing advanced methods in Optimization to solve real world problems.

Josh works in Oracle, PL/SQL, Java, Python, OPL, Linear Programming, Constraint Programming, Factor Modeling, Statistics, Analytics, Forecasting, and Volatility.

Josh is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in the Operations Research department and has a BA in Economics and a BS in Applied Math from Yale University where he studied finance with Robert Shiller and Investments with Dean Takahashi. His Masters of Science and Industrial Engineering is from the University of Southern California, where he was awarded an academic scholarship.

Josh speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, and basic Quechua. He is a U.S. Masters Swimming record holder.