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ALUMNI SNAPSHOTS
Séan Slattery
B.A., computer science, Trinity College, Dublin, 1993
M.S., computer science, Carnegie Mellon University, 1998
Ph.D., computer science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001
A career in the financial sector For a guy who grew up
in the small city of Port Laoise in the Irish Midlands (“it
was kind of like the U.S. Midwest—think Ohio”) the idea
left Séan Slattery cold. “It’s got this kind of Hollywood
reputation, and I had visions of people on these highpressure
trading floors, shouting at one another,” he says.
Instead, when Slattery finished his Ph.D. at CMU, he went
to work at a startup in London that was developing a new
search engine. “I hung on there for about two years, but
when they started having redundancies, I decided it was
time for me to start looking around,” he says. He ended up
in “The City”—London’s financial sector—where he found
a different environment than he’d envisioned. It appealed
to his love of problem solving, and puzzles.
“When I was a kid, I used to go to the library, and when
I was finally allowed to join the adult library, I discovered
all of these books of puzzles by Martin Gardner from
Scientific American,” he says. “I loved them. I ended up
tearing through them, and that’s when I first realized I
had an aptitude for that kind of thinking.”
In his current role as head of emerging markets,
commodities and FX quants, Americas, for Credit Suisse
Group AG, the puzzles that Slattery’s group is solving
require deriving the fair prices for financial instruments
known as derivatives, and then minimizing the exposure to
risk for the company and its clients. “We’re writing the core
calculations that get slotted into other pieces of software,”
he says. “We’re running these calculation engines by
writing formulae that require a really deep understanding
of how financial maths work. There’s a lot of software in
investment banking these days, and it requires a lot of
attention to detail—to ‘getting it right.’ It also requires very
strong programmers.”
The basic skills that Slattery learned while working on his
doctorate in computer science are the skills he uses every
day, he says, adding that Tom Mitchell, CMU’s Fredkin
Professor of Artificial Intelligence and head of the Machine
Learning Department, was an important influence. “One
of the things I really admired about Tom is that he was
very, very good at cutting to the core of any problem and
defining what the important pieces were, and what the
unimportant distractions were,” Slattery says.
Slattery earned his undergraduate degree at Dublin’s
Trinity College and was attracted to CMU because one of
his classmates, Joseph O’Sullivan (CS’97), had gone there.
“I knew it was a tough school, but we didn’t quite have the
Web then, so I had written a letter asking for literature on
the master’s program,” he says. “They wrote back and said,
well, we don’t have a stand-alone master’s program right
now, but why don’t you apply for the Ph.D. program”
He was glad he did. “Both Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh
were good places to be,” Slattery says. “Pittsburgh is a
wonderful place. It’s a proper city, but it’s a very manageable
scale, and then Carnegie Mellon had a family atmosphere
that was very encouraging to my research.”
Slattery’s busy schedule doesn’t leave a lot of room for
hobbies, though he and his wife, Gordana, do have a
passion for cinema. “My tastes range from classics like
‘The Third Man’ to the kinds of stuff that you would
classify as ‘bad movies,’” he says.
—Jason Togyer (DC’96)
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