Matei Zaharia is an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University and Chief Technologist at Databricks. He started the Spark project during his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2009. Before that, Matei worked broadly in datacenter systems, co-starting the Apache Mesos project and contributing as a committer on Apache Hadoop. Matei’s research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for the best Ph.D. dissertation in computer science.