Michael Brzustowicz is a physicist turned data scientist. After a PhD from Indiana University, Michael spent his post doctoral years at Stanford University where he shot high powered Xrays at tiny molecules. Jumping ship from academia, he worked at many startups (including his own) and has been pioneering big data techniques all the way. Michael specializes in building distributed data systems and extracting knowledge from massive data. He spends most of his time writing customized, multithreaded code for statistical modeling and machine learning approaches to everyday big data problems. Michael now teaches Big Data, parttime, at the University of San Francisco.