Luke Ashton

Luke Ashton is currently a Regulatory Economist at HData. Prior to this, they worked as a Business Analyst and Data Manager at HData for 1 year and 2 months. In their role as Business Analyst, they were responsible for taking data from Federal Energy Regulation Commission filings and developing Key Performance Indicators for energy clients regulated by FERC. Luke also integrated external datasets to help answer key regulatory questions for federal compliance and predict future regulation based on partisan priorities. As Data Manager, they were responsible for designing databases to accommodate new data from FERC Filings, ensuring updated data fields and entities were loaded to the front-end data hub, and designing queries in PostgreSQL for one-off reporting needs and business analytics.

Before HData, Luke was a MA Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University where they concentrated on researching policy related to Technology & Innovation and its intersection with data privacy, healthcare, and entrepreneurship. During their time at the Mercatus Center, they worked on the Catallaxi project (formerly X2RL: eXtensible Regulatory Reporting Language), which aimed to conceptualize and develop a markup language for regulatory and legal documents. Luke also worked on quantifying regulation at the meta-level based on industry, occupation, and impact on regulated end-users, as well as creating simpler queries for regulation by re-designing the engine behind regulation, allowing documents to communicate with each other to facilitate easier and quicker tools for FinTech, RegTech, and legal software. Other notable projects Luke worked on include research for the QuantGov initiative by scraping data from state statutes and administrative code for further analysis by the scholars at the Mercatus Center, using machine learning tools to understand the impact of CFR and state regulation on industries, particularly on health occupations and technology companies, examining the potential impact of Section 230 reform on entrepreneurs and tech companies, and developing regulatory analyses on health and tech regulation on the state and federal level.