Jose Luis Rodriguez

Jose Luis Rodriguez currently serves as the Vice President of Business Intelligence at Midwest BankCentre in St. Louis, MO. Midwest BankCentre is a premier community bank which has operated since 1906. The bank prides itself on its values: investing capital profitably in their whole community and reinvesting customers’ local deposits locally. He previously worked for the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign where he served as Director of the Margolis Market Information Lab (a finance and technology lab). During his tenure at Illinois, he transformed the lab into a state-of-the-art data science and finance active learning environment where tomorrow’s business leaders were and continue to be shaped. Jose Luis is not only known for his advanced computer science skills and research, but also for his management and leadership capabilities, and he worked closely with a number of large financial firms and market makers (including Bloomberg LP, S&P Global, Refinitiv and CME Group) to bring specialized resources to students. Under his leadership, cohorts of highly qualified student fellows disseminated hands-on finance and data science training programs to large swaths of students college wide. In addition to his role as Director of the lab, he taught courses to graduate students in the Master of Finance and iMBA programs, and he continues his engagement with Illinois as an instructor. He was also awarded the R.C. Evans Innovation Fellowship in 2020 for his research and development of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications in finance and investing. Prior to joining Illinois, Jose Luis served as Assistant Director and data scientist at the CME Business Analytics Lab at the Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University Chicago. In addition to leadership responsibilities, his data science skills were heavily utilized by faculty in their research endeavors across a variety of topics. Some of his research which he found most compelling included work regarding the 2010 Flash Crash, high frequency trading, and the impact of natural disasters (specifically Hurricane Sandy) on the market. Part of his research contributed to The Routledge Handbook of Positive Communication which was published in 2019. Additionally, he was awarded the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Research Grant (2018) and the Data Science Support and Training Research Grant (2016). He also taught business analytics classes to undergraduate and graduate students. Jose Luis’s professional affiliations include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science and bachelor’s degrees in both Computer Science and Mathematics from Loyola University Chicago. While a student at Loyola, he was awarded with the Outstanding Loyola Undergraduate Research Award and he was the first-place winner of a national market research competition (Next Generation) hosted by the Gfk Group.