Matei Zaharia is a Cofounder and Chief Technologist at Databricks as well as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He started the Apache Spark project during his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009, and has worked broadly on other widely used data and AI software, including MLflow, Delta Lake, Dolly and ColBERT. He works on a wide variety of projects in data management and machine learning at Databricks and Stanford. Matei’s research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).