Guðmundur Einarsson
Statistician at TM Insurance
I'm a statistician with a background in applied mathematics, genetics, and machine learning. My PhD was on sparse classification: fast optimization algorithms for linear discriminant analysis in high-dimensional settings. That work produced the R package accSDA on CRAN.
After a short postdoctoral stint at DTU (Technical University of Denmark), I joined Oqton as employee 42. Small team, distributed, a lot of PhDs and ex-Google X engineers. Samir Hanna started the company after leaving Autodesk, where he'd been VP of Additive Manufacturing. The goal was to close the gap between designing 3D objects and manufacturing them at scale. I worked on geometry processing: automatic support generation for metal 3D printing, quality inspection from point clouds, alignment for robotics. 3D Systems acquired Oqton in 2020.
From there I moved into large-scale genetic research at deCODE Genetics and spent six years running genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in Icelandic and international cohorts. I came out of it with first- and co-authored papers in Nature Genetics, Cell, Nature Communications, and other journals. Along the way I also built fastqq, an R package that speeds up quantile-quantile plot generation by 80× for the millions of p-values typical in modern GWAS.
After six years at deCODE, I moved to TM Insurance in autumn 2025. Landsbankinn had acquired the company, and bancassurance integrations don't come around often. I'd rather be working through one than reading about it later. Being there from early on, as a statistician, means watching how two very different financial organizations fit their data together.
Education
- PhD in Applied Mathematics, Technical University of Denmark, 2018
- MSc in Mathematics (emphasis on statistics), University of Iceland, 2014
- BSc in Mathematics (emphasis on computer science), University of Iceland, 2012
Everything on this blog reflects my own views and experiences. None of it represents my employer or any organization I belong to.