Travis Meyer

Travis Meyer is a Senior Data Scientist in Customer Experience at Vanguard. He uses his background as a Neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Deep Learning at Carnegie Mellon University to develop artificial intelligence tools that process and simplify large amounts of data.

Research and Work

Travis’ early work focused on learning how neural networks in the visual system worked by studying learning, memory and complex visual functions:

• Working Memory in Prefrontal Cortex Neural Circuits and Learning in Prefrontal Cortex as part of his PhD Thesis.
• To acomplish this he developed a new software IDE to control and coordinate the experimental hardware and store the data securely.

Travis interviewed at Google Brain and the University of Pennsylvania to see how to take this knowledge of neural circuitry to develop artificial intelligence algorithms. He chose to move to Philadelphia as the Director of Visual Memory Laboratories and Lead Senior Researcher to train new graduate students in AI, analytics and experimentation.

• He started by taking on the hardest, stalled, projects and bringing them up-to-date and completed publication
• He then developed a new research pipeline to bring in funding and provide research projects for graduate students.
• To translate research into action, he directed students from Penn’s General Robotics, Automation Sensing, & Perception Lab to update reinforcement learning algorithms like the Bellman Equation publication, many of which now work in industry, like Google Deep Mind and Medtronics.
• Developing breakthroughs typically require smaller breakthroughs, necessity truly is the mother of invention. He has developed a number of software packages in Matlab and Python that he provides as open source on github: Github Link:

He joined Vanguard’s customer experience department to automate the processing and insights from large amounts of data. Using NLP clustering and sentiment analysis he has analyzed millions of survey comments into easily accessible formats for data analysts and business stakeholders. He has also developed the first computer vision model at Vanguard to identify and process sensitive customer documents to save the company millions of dollars.

Family and Fun

Travis lives with his wife and 3 sons in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He loves tinkering with new technology, like building his own compute clusters to train and experiment with new AI models. Someday he would love to learn to fly!