Miriam Friedel

Miriam Friedel is an innovative technologist whose career has spanned both academia and industry, from 10-person start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. She brings deep expertise at the intersection of mathematical rigor and engineering at scale, and her experience delivering ML models in real world settings informs her role as an associate professor of the practice at the School of Data Science. She is particularly interested in the impact of organizational structure and leadership behavioral dynamics on the training and deployment of machine learning models, particularly with the advent of LLMs and agentic AI.

Prior to joining UVA, Friedel was a vice president of machine learning engineering at Capital One, where she led a large organization responsible for the enterprise tooling used in critical ML and AI models. She also led the replatforming of Capital One's loss forecasting framework, a crucial piece of infrastructure to pressure test economic scenarios and remain in compliance with the Dodd-Frank Act. Prior to Capital One, Friedel held roles as director of and senior scientist at Elder Research (now a MANTECH company), research scientist at the Mount Imaging Centre in Toronto, and as a consultant and software engineer at Princeton Consultants. This breadth of experience has made Friedel an expert on the entire model development life cycle. From formulating the right questions to monitoring models in production, she has a clear grasp of which problems to solve and how to solve them.

Friedel holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an Sc.B. in Physics from Brown University.