Alexander VillacortaAlumni Engagement Medal Award 2022

Chief Data Officer and Co-Founder, ResiShares
Louisville, CO

Career Path

Alex Villacorta (MApMath’02) is a pragmatic and ever curious Data Scientist who has served numerous roles in the data sciences. Starting with his graduate work in the Applied Math department at CU, he has always had an inherent passion for the science of uncertainty. His work within Applied Math centered around the simulation of linked random events and sparked his pursuit of understanding possible outcomes in a world that is increasingly uncertain.  After CU, he refined that passion through his Ph.D. dissertation work in Statistics and Applied Probability at the University of California, Santa Barbara whereby he researched the flow of information in news articles across spatial, temporal, and semantic dimensions. Looking to apply these tools to a real-world application, he was drawn to the world of real estate due to the foundational premise that real estate value is based on a series of factors that are idiosyncratic, dynamic in their evolution over time, and spatially correlated. 

For the last 15 years, Villacorta has been deeply involved in all aspects of real estate valuation and has led multiple data science teams including the one that built the appraisal review engine for Freddie Mac. Today, he is Co-Founder and Chief Data Officer of ResiShares, a quantitative-based real estate investment firm that specializes in identifying housing price dynamics. Villacorta directs fundamental research on real estate market composition, home valuation, and forecasting, as well as all aspects of data engineering. He now lives in Louisville, Colorado with his wife and two children. When he is not neck deep in data, he enjoys spending time with this lovely family, playing ultimate frisbee, shooting arrows, and being a die-hard Lakers fan.

Comments from The BOLD Center on Alex's contributions in the past year

Villacorta serves as the chair of the BOLD Advisory Council (BAC) and leads the BAC in providing great insights to the BOLD Center in ways to engage and support student success. His ability to analyze data and metrics provides the BOLD Center with ways that help us respond to negative trends and strengthen positive ones. Additionally, Villacorta is the first to offer words to celebrate the BOLD Center's successes, and he challenges us to make even greater impacts in the College and beyond. During the challenging times of COVID-19 over the last two years, he provided encouragement and support to the BOLD Center staff and advocated to the College leadership to continue its financial support of the BOLD Center.

Recently, he co-led a professional development workshop called “Resume Speak”, to BOLD Center students, teaching them key strategies on resume development and how to translate non-engineering experiences to powerful resume language that illuminates their value through these experiences. His personal interactions with the BOLD students refined their thinking about the value that they could bring to the workplace and generated great ideas about how to reflect their value on their resume. We, in the BOLD Center, are very grateful for his support and ongoing advocacy. Villacorta continually encourages the BOLD Center staff to “keep on keeping on”, especially during these challenging times.