Alessio Brini

I am an Executive in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, where I work with the Digital Asset Research & Engineering Collaborative (DAREC). My research and teaching focus on financial challenges in digital assets and decentralized finance, with a strong emphasis on applied machine learning and data science. I work across the full spectrum of machine learning — supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning — to develop models that advance our understanding of complex financial systems.

At Duke, I teach courses including Machine Learning for FinTech, Data Wrangling and Visualization with Python, and Introduction to Statistics in the Master of Engineering in Financial Technology program. I also mentor students on FinTech capstone projects and guide summer research initiatives.

Prior to my current role, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the same department at Duke since January 2022.

I earned my Ph.D. in Mathematical Finance from Scuola Normale Superiore, where I focused on reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making in finance. My dissertation, Reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making: a data-driven approach for finance, reflects my ongoing interest in the intersection of finance, technology, and computation.