Sears is a leader with expertise in the areas of data science and analytics as well as enterprise and internet technology. Throughout his career, Sears has spent time building, leading, and innovating in industries including healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services.
Sears leads MassMutual’s enterprise technology and experience: a global team focused on bringing digital capabilities, automation, data science, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to bear throughout the firm and driving change in the industry. Notable accomplishments include launching LifeScore Labs, a MassMutual wholly-owned subsidiary that aims to bring a standard, AI-driven risk score to life insurance industry for the purposes of meeting modern consumer expectations around fairness and transparency in digital decision making. Before that, he founded On The Spot Sports, LLC which designed and implemented a real-time machine learning platform for predicting within-competition events in college and professional basketball games. Before that, he was responsible for architecting one of the nation’s first regional tele-health networks in Colorado.
Sears holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, M.S. in Telecommunications, and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.B.A. from the Sloan School at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sears is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has numerous patents and publications in the areas of machine learning, technology and financial services. Sears has been recognized with the Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award by the American Statistical Association, as one of the life insurance industry’s top 25 innovators under 40 by LIMRA and a top 100 innovator by Corinium Intelligence. He is a member of the State of Massachusetts AI task force as well as an advisor to Antara Health and eShare. He serves on the board of managers for Barings and has served as a member of the Innovation Committee for the American Council of Life Insurers.
