Legal Current

Courtesy: Fotodog

One of the most interesting people at Thomson Reuters has to be Tonya Custis.

By day, she’s a woman of letters and a Senior Research Scientist. By night, she’s a skater with North Star Roller Girls in Minneapolis. Custis, or RAGE-edy Ann, as she is known by fans and teammates, has worked in the R&D group at Thomson Reuters for five years and has been skating for the last three.

Custis’ day job consists of performing research primarily in the areas of Natural Language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval, to provide software solutions to R&D’s corporate customers. Her job is a perfect fit for her educational background, which consists of a bachelor’s degree in clarinet performance and music theory from the University of Connecticut; a Master of Arts in linguistics; a Master of Science in computer science; and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Minnesota.

She attests that all her degrees are actually similar.

“Music theory isn’t so different from linguistics or computer science; it’s all about abstracting larger patterns from data in order to make sense out of it,” she explains.

Custis also has no problem drawing a relationship between her professional career and her illustrious – if somewhat curious – hobby as a roller girl.

Courtesy: Preflash Gordon

“In a lot of ways being a research scientist and being a member of a roller derby team are the same. In both you work with others, trying to find a solution to a common goal,” she explains.

Custis started roller derby after one fateful match, or bout, as they are called in the derby world.

“I saw it and I had to do it,” she said. “I watched and thought, ‘Oh, I could do that,’ and then I did.”

Next year Custis will be appearing in a diversity calendar through Novations, a Boston-based global talent development company. Novations approached her league, which has one other Ph.D. holder and a third currently working on her Ph.D, and ultimately decided on her.

“They took pictures of me at my desk and had me skating around the halls at work. It was kind of embarrassing, but also fun,” she said.

It turns out, the most interesting aspect of Custis is not just her career or hobby, or that she does both. It is her ability to find the relationship between what seem to be completely different things and making connections that show information and ideas in a different, and clearer, light.

Posted by Anne Lawver in: Company Current | Voices |