03 — CV

CV

PhD economist and AI engineer. Pretoria, South Africa.

charlvanschoor1@gmail.com · github.com/charlVSchoor · orcid.org/0009-0006-4178-6996

Experience

2025 — present

Senior Economist — Research Data Centre

South African Reserve Bank

Standing up the SARB's research data centre; finetuning LLMs and computer vision models; agentic workflows and AI engineering for economic research.
2024 — 2025

Research Fellow

South African Reserve Bank
2024 — present

Research Fellow

UP Macrolab, University of Pretoria

Central bank communication and data science in the lab around the SARB Chair in Monetary Economics.
2019 — 2020

Data Scientist

Discovery Health

Applied data science on large-scale health and claims data.
2018 — 2019

Research Assistant

United Nations University (UNU-WIDER, SA-TIED)

Worked with the anonymised SARS administrative tax data underpinning the SA-TIED research programme.
2016 — 2018

Research Assistant

University of Pretoria

Department of Economics.

Education

2020 — 2024

PhD (Economics)

University of Pretoria

SARB Chair Doctoral Fellow. Computational linguistics applied to central bank communication: sentiment, topic and consistency modelling of SARB MPC statements; Simtran, a similarity-transformer architecture for small, dense text corpora.
2018

MCom (Economics)

University of Pretoria

Skills

Machine learning: LLM finetuning · sentiment & stance modelling · computer vision · transformers · agentic systems & LLM orchestration
Data engineering: Big-data pipelines · research data infrastructure · administrative microdata (tax, health, survey, text, image)
Economics: Monetary economics · central bank communication · applied econometrics
Tools: Python (primary) · SQL · git · Linux

Languages

English · Afrikaans · German