laura.a.rossi.r@gmail.com · lauraarossi.com · linkedin.com/in/laura-agustina-rossi · github.com/lauraarossi
Projects
Things I've designed and built on my own time, the client work behind my Deloitte years, and earlier research.
Personal projects
Everything here is solo work: designed, built and deployed by me.
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Plan Away
A web app for planning trips together on one shared drag-and-drop timeline of stays, day trips and travel. It splits costs across the group, totals multi-select items, marks payments and to-dos, summarises stays across the whole trip, zooms between views and autosaves. Available in 30+ languages.
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Eevie
Compares what a car really costs to run with the alternative — an EV against petrol or diesel — using actual weekly fuel prices.
- Ingests and reconciles the EU Weekly Oil Bulletin, EEA CO2 monitoring data and the evdb and UK VCA catalogues, with heuristics that merge the same car spelled differently across sources.
- Idempotent refreshes that keep user-entered prices; logged background refresh jobs that survive a sleeping database.
- Normalised PostgreSQL schema with electricity tariffs versioned by effective date, including bands that cross midnight; emissions on a like-for-like basis; currency conversion.
- Google sign-in verified server-side and a role-based admin console.
- FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, PostgreSQL, React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Recharts and Docker, with 337 automated backend tests.
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MTG Chicken Soup
An AI deck builder for Magic: The Gathering Commander.
- Answers grounded in card data through OpenAI embeddings in pgvector and live Scryfall lookups, so it doesn't invent cards, with handling for ambiguous card names.
- Prompts adapt to the detected game format; swappable LLM providers (Claude, OpenAI-compatible, Ollama) with streamed responses.
- Data pipeline from Scryfall and EDHREC, and a LoRA fine-tuning pipeline for Qwen2.5-7B (built, not yet run).
- Google sign-in, profiles, deck saving, sharing and editing, CSV import/export and a mobile layout.
Deloitte client work
Anonymised projects from my time in Deloitte's Actuarial Modelling Centre.
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Capital modelling — technical lead
Stepped in as technical lead on a complex internal-model capital solution.
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Solvency II calculation and reporting engine
Designed and implemented a Python Solvency II calculation engine and report generator that integrates with the client's MG-ALFA models and produces management reports and data for downstream processing.
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Assumptions management system
An ETL system in Python behind an Angular and Azure Functions web UI. I joined as an individual contributor and became lead developer; the system is live and has had excellent feedback from its users.
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Catastrophe modelling
A greenfield loss and liability modelling system built with an international team, taking in RMS and AIR data.
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Unit-linked data validation and analysis of change
Migrated the validation and preprocessing for their unit-linked business from Access (SQL and VBA) to a Python program 100 times faster, and trained their team to own and maintain it.
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Actuarial reporting proof of concept
A desktop app that takes actuarial model data and generates customer reports as PDFs and Excel files, with automated emailing.
Earlier and academic
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Foundry angel investor interviews
Interviewed 16 potential US and international investors from the Foundry's network on interest in re-establishing a Purdue angel investor group and on their investment habits and hurdles, and compiled a qualitative report.
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Start-up research for the Purdue Foundry
- Adipo Therapeutics: target investor groups and possible corporate partners for a biotechnology start-up.
- Go-to-market models: spreadsheet models of go-to-market strategy, revenue potential, growth drivers and costs for SpeechVive and NutraMaize.
- Hydration and college sports: research on the impact of high-accuracy hydration monitoring on collegiate sports performance and revenue.
- CRM evaluation: requirements gathering and a fitness review of the Foundry's CRM with the Purdue Research Foundation's IT team, identifying optimisations and cost-effective new functionality.
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West Paw inventory analysis
Analysis of holding costs and inventory levels for sustainable pet products manufacturer West Paw, leading to a new inventory policy recommendation and an analysis of its implications. Download the analysis
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OEE database
An MS Access database and reporting tool, built with a Chicago chemical production facility, that collects and summarises overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) across several facilities.
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BA thesis: Water under the bridge? Truth commissions' effectiveness in South Africa and Morocco
Based on fieldwork interviews and automated text analysis in Rabat and Cape Town. Download the thesis (PDF)
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Building community through sports in South African townships: playing towards substantive transition
South Africa's political transition away from apartheid succeeded, but racial tensions and extreme economic inequality persist. The paper proposes sports education and direct investment in publicly financed, community-managed facilities to support reconciliation across racial lines and community development in the townships. Download the paper (PDF)
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Is political messaging persuasive or manipulative? Twitter messages about the Supreme Court nominations
Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting, 2017. Download the paper (PDF)