Christopher P. Monterola (born 1976) is a Filipino physicist and machine learning scientist, educator, entrepreneur, and technology advisor for various enterprises and organizations in Asia. He sits on the board of Xurpas, Inc., a publicly listed technology company in the Philippine Stock Exchange that has offered innovative IT products and services for the past twenty years. Dr. Monterola is also a National Academy of Science and Technology Academician who holds an Aboitiz Chair in Data Science and a Professorship at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). He is also AIM's Founding Head of the Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (ASITE). ASITE is the newest of the four schools of AIM that houses five academic programs: MSc in Data Science, Masters in Innovation and Business, Masters in Entrepreneurship, Ph.D. in Data Science, and a Bachelor of Science in Data Science and Business Administration. Under ASITE is also an advanced analytics industry-facing research lab, the Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems (ACCeSs) lab, where he is the Executive Managing Director. Education and early career Monterola spent his childhood in the Narra and Puerto Princesa, Palawan. The family then moved to San Pablo, Laguna, in his teenage years. In his early education, he moved from one school to another, from Narra Pilot Elementary School to Puerto Princess Elementary School to Laguna College in High School. Chris majored in physics at the National Institute of Physics at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, in 1992. He graduated magna cum laude, at the top of the Applied Physics cohort. He was recognized to be among the top 15 graduates of the entire UP system upon graduation. Monterola also earned his master of science degree and doctorate in physics from the same university where he graduated as the Most Outstanding Ph.D. student of the College of Science and the Edgardo Gomez Awardee for Excellence in Research. His dissertation was titled Neural Networks: New Insights and Applications, which spun into two publications in top-tiered journals including Physical Review Letters, a top journal of the American Physical Society. After getting his Ph.D., he joined the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany as a post-doctoral researcher, where he studied the dynamics of the olfactory system, aside from algorithmic innovations in the collective computing of neural networks. References 1976 births Living people