tastytrade’s Queen of Quant, Julia Spina is a member of the research team and hosts The Skinny on Quantitative Finance, where she dives into the advanced concepts and tools of quantitative finance and how they can apply to a trading portfolio. You can also find her co-hosting Research Specials Live alongside her fellow researchers or pitching trade ideas in Trades From the Research Team and You Know You Quant This.

Prior to tastytrade, Julia spent 6 years working in academic research labs in fields ranging from experimental biophotonics to clinical stem cell therapy. Julia has a BE in Engineering Physics with a minor in Computer Science, a BA in Applied Mathematics, and an MS in Physics, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In terms of her trading expertise, Julia specializes in using techniques from signal processing and machine learning to develop computational models of financial markets and instruments.

Coincidentally, Julia was placed in low-level math and science classes as a high school freshman (what were they thinking?!) and had originally planned to go to college for writing or linguistics, but after working in a materials science lab during her gap year, decided to go into physics despite the learning curve.