I’m the Director of the AI Foundry’s Knowledge Services organization at FactSet, and I took an unusual path to get here: from political science research, to production machine learning, to leading an AI organization. That combination of rigorous academic training, hands-on engineering and organizational leadership shapes how I work.
Industry
FactSet (2022 to present). FactSet is an S&P 500 financial data company serving more than 9,200 clients. I joined as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, became Associate Director of Data Solutions AI in 2024, and was promoted to Director, AI Foundry in 2026. I now lead more than 20 engineers, MLOps specialists and researchers on a global team spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia, organized into four sub-teams: three led by managers who report to me, plus an architecture team. We own the Knowledge Services platform, the entity, date, metric and concept resolution layer behind FactSet’s agentic products, and we contribute services to FactSet’s MCP platform, used by more than 650 client firms. Earlier work at FactSet built enterprise knowledge graphs (500M+ nodes, 2B+ relationships), graph neural networks for entity resolution, and production RAG pipelines.
SparkCognition Government Systems (2021 to 2022). As a machine learning engineer at this defense AI company, I built NLP and information retrieval pipelines for Air Force Research Labs, helping engineers surface relevant technical documents from massive unstructured corpora.
Consulting. Through J.E. Lambert Consulting LLC I advise startups, NGOs, public-sector teams and political campaigns on applied ML, from problem framing through production. More on the Services page.
Academia and research
I hold a PhD in Security Studies from the University of Central Florida. My dissertation forecast coups d’état from spatial and environmental determinants using ensemble machine learning. My research sits where computational methods meet security studies: forecasting political instability, analyzing fisheries conflict, and measuring leader psychology at a distance. I was then a postdoctoral scholar at UCF’s National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, using ML and NLP to assess disaster readiness at fine spatial resolution.
Broader interests include food security, political psychology, civil-military relations and forecasting. See Publications and the CV.
Teaching
I am a Global Scholar and Visiting Professor in the PhD in Business Administration program at the University of South Alabama’s Mitchell College of Business, where I teach the doctoral courses ML/AI for Business Analysis and Python for Business Analysis. Earlier I taught GIS for Political Analysis at the University of Central Florida. More on the Teaching page.
Education
- PhD, Security Studies, University of Central Florida, 2020. President of the Political Science Graduate Student Association; presentations at ISA, ISPP, SWPSA, SPSA and FPSA.
- MA, Political Science, University of New Orleans, 2015. Vice President of the Student Government Association; President of the Political Science Graduate Student Association.
- BA, Political Science, Auburn University, 2014. Presentations at the Southern and Alabama Political Science Associations.
Personal
When I’m not exploring social phenomena or working on ML problems, I enjoy hiking with our pup Rivia, playing sports of any kind, music, movies, books, and most of all spending time with my wife and son.
