Meet the NumFOCUS Team

Board of Directors

Sylvain Corlay

Sylvain Corlay is the founder and CEO of QuantStack, an open-source scientific computing software corporation. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris.

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As an open source developer, Sylvain has authored and contributed to a number of scientific computing projects. He is a core developer to Project Jupyter. Before starting QuantStack, Sylvain held various quant positions in the industry and adjunct faculty roles in French and American universities.
Sylvain Corlay

Logan Kilpatrick

Logan currently leads advocacy at PathAI, a Boston based company using machine learning to improve cancer patient outcomes. Logan received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University with a focus on Computer Science and is now a dual graduate student at Northwestern University’s School of Law and Harvard University.

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Prior to his election to the board, Logan has been serving as a member of the NumFOCUS Small Development Grants, Affiliated Projects Selection Committee, and is now co-president of the NumFOCUS Incubator. He is also currently serving as the Developer Community Advocate for the Julia Language, a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project, and was previously the Community Manager for the Julia Language. Logan is also on the Board of Directors at DEFNA, the organization behind DjangoCon US.

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Logan Kilpatrick

Rosie Pongracz

Rosie Pongracz joins the board after three years as a member of the NumFOCUS Advisory Council representing IBM. She is an Engineer by training, builder by practice, and has expertise in full-stack technical marketing and sales. She obtained her degree from Carnegie Mellon in Electrical/Biomedical Engineering.

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Her current focus within the technology realm is all things data and AI, platform, and open source. She has launched over 50 products and companies and operated as a leader at both early-stage companies and large corporations. She is currently at IBM building data and AI MVPs for customers to transform their businesses.

Rosie Pongracz

James Powell

James has played a vital role in organizing the PyData community while serving as a liaison during his years as a NumFOCUS Vice President. He has attended 30+ PyData events throughout the world helping to recruit the best talent and ideas to better the community. James has also worked with core developers behind numerous NumFOCUS projects to advance their communities.

James Powell

Katrina Riehl

Dr. Katrina Riehl is President of the Board of Directors at NumFOCUS, Head of the Streamlit Data Team at Snowflake, and Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown University.

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  For almost two decades, Katrina has worked extensively in the fields of scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, and visualization. Most notably, she has helped lead data science efforts at the University of Texas Austin Applied Research Laboratory, Apple, HomeAway (now, Vrbo), and Cloudflare.

 
Katrina Riehl

Lawrence Wilson Gray

Dr. Gray is the Head of Data Science at KPMG Spark, where he builds predictive products with machine learning and Python that are reinventing how Bookkeepers work.

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He teaches Data Science and Data Analytics at Georgetown University. He is also a frequent volunteer and committee member for PyData, PyCon, and NumFocus. He is a core contributor and maintainer for the open-source software Project, Yellowbrick. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine in Cellular and Molecular Physiology.

Lawrence Wilson Gray

NumFOCUS Staff

Leah Silen

Leah Silen has been with NumFOCUS from its beginning, working with the founding board members to write the application for NumFOCUS’s nonprofit status. Before joining NumFOCUS, she worked in the nonprofit sector as a Public Relations and Program Director with a focus on community relations and fundraising. Leah has also volunteered and sat on several boards of nonprofit organizations.

Leah Silen
Executive Director

Arliss Collins

Arliss Collins joined NumFOCUS in 2020 as the Open Source Developer Advocate.  Before joining NumFOCUS she worked as the Data & Metrics Analyst for the Mozilla Foundation as well as the Participation Coordinator for the Mozilla Science Lab.  She brings with her experience in open source advocacy, data science and community engagement. Arliss has a degree in Engineering from Queen’s University, Canada

Arliss Collins
Open Source Developer Advocate

Nicole Foster

Nicole joined NumFOCUS in 2019 as Executive Operations Administrator. Before joining NumFOCUS she worked as an Executive Coordinator and an Administrative Manager. Nicole has a variety of experience, including client services, vendor management, project management, accounting, and legal compliance.

Nicole Foster
Director of Operations

Lynn Brubaker

​Lynn Brubaker graduated with a Bachelor of Science Business Administration.  Before joining NumFOCUS, she worked at a hedge fund as an Office Manager.

Lynn Brubaker
Project Finance Manager

Lindsay Stecher

Lindsay joined the NumFOCUS team in June 2022. Prior to becoming a team member, she worked as a business strategy and development specialist consulting for nonprofits around the world. Her focus is heavily on grant management and project development. 

Lindsay Stecher
Grant Coordinator

Jim Weiss

Jim Weiss joined NumFOCUS in 2017, bringing over seven years of event management experience to the organization. Prior to joining NumFOCUS, Jim worked in Washington, D.C., coordinating congressional hearings for the U.S. House of Representatives and managing events for the U.S. Air Force. Jim hails from Pennsylvania and graduated from Lafayette College.

Jim Weiss
Director of Events and Resources

Samina Trachier

Samina Trachier joined NumFOCUS in 2021 as the Events & Digital Marketing Coordinator, and as of 2022 is the Events and Digital Marketing Manager. She’s a graduate of New York University where she received a BFA in Game Design. Before joining NumFOCUS Samina was active in the Austin events industry and acted as the Media Communications Coordinator for The OpenAir Collective.

Samina Trachier
Events & Digital Marketing Manager

Donovan DelValle

Donovan DelValle (they/them) joined NumFOCUS in 2022 as an Events Intern, and as of 2023 has been hired full-time as the Marketing & Events Coordinator. They received their Bachelor’s in Music Education from New York University in 2021 and have since branched into the events and communications field. They have a background in event planning and working with first-generation students from the Upward Bound program and have aimed to pivot their education and communication skills into a new career in digital marketing, event coordination, and community building.

Donovan DelValle
Marketing & Events Coordinator

Tomara Youngblood

Tomara joined NumFOCUS in 2022 as the Events Manager. Before joining NumFOCUS, she worked in municipal and non-profit recreation and event management for over 17 years. Tomara is a graduate of the University of North Texas.

Tomara Youngblood
Events Manager

Nolan Fortman

Nolan joined NumFOCUS in October of 2022. He has a background in Software Sales beginning his career at Oracle before joining Placer.ai which is a startup leveraging ML & AI for mobile location intelligence. Nolan is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nolan Fortman
Director of Business Development

Savannah Simons

Prior to joining NumFOCUS in October 2022, Savannah managed multiple clients for a bookkeeping firm. Savannah has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Eastern Oregon University along with multiple years of bookkeeping experience. Savannah enjoys working with numbers and in her spare she likes to spend time with her dogs.

Savannah Simons
AP/AR Clerk

Kamila Stepniowska

Kamila joined NumFOCUS in 2023 as the Projects DEI Coordinator. She has more than decade experience in tech, as entrepreneur, educational programs manager and community builder in Europe and the US. Kamila specialised in AI. In previous years she has been creating B2B, machine learning education programs with deepsense.ai, supporting diversity as COO at Geek Girls Carrots, the Women Who Code Seattle Evangelist, Advisor at She’s Coding, SheWorx Steering Committee members. She brings her experience in DEI, community building and sociology.

Kamila Stepniowska
Projects DEI Coordinator

Miriam Mueller

Miriam Mueller joined NumFocus in June 2023 as the Finance Director. Miriam is a 25+ year veteran of nonprofit work, and has worked in nonprofit finance, operations, fundraising, and technology. They are joining NumFocus after two years as a finance and operations director and a decade of owning an accounting firm where they worked with nonprofits and entrepreneurs of all types. Miriam holds a Masters Degree in Medieval History from Columbia University in New York.

Miriam Mueller
Finance Director

Jon Starr

Jonathan joined NumFOCUS in 2023 as Program Manager for the Open-Source Science initiative. He brings experience in science-based open-source projects, science communication and engagement non-profits, and business management and operations. Secondary to NumFOCUS, Jonathan continues to work to enable open science as a core contributor to several open-source projects.

Jon Starr
Program Manager - OSSci

Kelby Lorenz

Kelby joined NumFOCUS in 2023 as the Digital Marketing Specialist. With 7 years of experience behind him in marketing, advertising, PR, and user experience, he is excited to be a part of the NumFOCUS team! In addition to his work here, he also supports his community theatre with their marketing needs, and is a freelance photographer. He graduated from Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri in 2017 with a B.A. in Advertising and Public Relations, and is currently pursuing a M.A. in Communication from Drury University.

Kelby Lorenz
Digital Marketing Specialist

Advisory Council

Brian Granger

Brian Granger is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, CA. He has a background in theoretical atomic, molecular and optical physics, with a Ph.D from the University of Colorado. 

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His current research interests include quantum computing, parallel and distributed computing and interactive computing environments for scientific and technical computing. He is a core developer of the IPython project and is an active contributor to a number of other open source projects focused on scientific computing in Python.
Brian Granger

Matt Greenwood

Matt Greenwood is Chief Innovation Officer and Managing Director at Two Sigma Investments.

Matt Greenwood joined Two Sigma Investments in November 2003. As part of his responsibilities, Matt sets vision and direction for a number of engineering and modeling teams.

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Prior to joining the firm, Matt worked at Entrisphere, Inc. where he served as Lead Developer and Manager for a number of systems on the network element. Prior to that, Matt worked at Bell Labs, in the Operating Systems Group, and for IBM Research, where he was responsible for a number of early efforts in tablet computing and distributed computing. Matt earned a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Oxford University, and a master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Matt also holds a PhD in mathematics from Columbia University, where he taught for a number of years.
Matt Greenwood

Jason Grout

Jason Grout is a core Jupyter developer working at Databricks in San Francisco. He works primarily on JupyterLab and the interactive widget system and associated projects.

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He has also contributed to the open source Sage mathematical software system for many years. Previously, Jason was an assistant professor of mathematics at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

For more information about Jason’s open-source work, see his GitHub account.

Jason Grout

Stefan Karpinski

Stefan is a data scientist and applied mathematician working at MIT. He has worked at Akamai, Citrix Online, and Etsy. Currently, Stefan is working on a next-generation programming language for numerical and scientific computing, called Julia.

Stefan Karpinski

Mike McCarty

Mike is a Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA working on RAPIDS and Dask. Previously, Mike was a Distinguished Machine Learning Engineering at the Capital One Center for Machine Learning, where he leads a team of engineers building scalable data science and machine learning foundational libraries for the enterprise.

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He has also contributed to open source software projects in the PyData ecosystem such as Dask and Intake. Mike holds two bachelor’s degrees in computer science and physics, and has over 15 years of experience in software engineering and scientific computing in astronomy, computational sciences, data science, machine learning, and enterprise products.

Mike McCarty

Shahrokh Mortazavi

Shahrokh Mortazavi has been the Python Czar at Microsoft since 2011 where he lead the development of Python in Visual Studio and VS Code IDEs, Azure (Jupyter) Notebooks, Azure Python SDKs, and generally promoted the adoption of OSS and specifically the Python ecosystem.  Previously, he was in the High Performance Computing group at Microsoft. 

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He worked on the Phoenix Compiler tool chain (code gen, opt, analysis, JITs) at Microsoft Research and prior to that, led Sun Microsystems’ Code Generation & Optimization compiler backend teams for 10 years.
Shahrokh Mortazavi

Travis Oliphant

Dr. Oliphant has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Mayo Clinic, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering (and Math) from Brigham Young University.

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Travis has worked extensively with Python for numerical and scientific programming since 1997, and was the primary developer of the NumPy package and the author of the definitive Guide to NumPy. He is also the primary founding author of the SciPy package. During his academic career, he has worked in the fields of satellite remote sensing, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Ultrasound, elastography, and general inverse problems. He was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University from 2001 to 2007 where he taught courses in probability theory, electromagnetics, inverse problems, and signal processing. In addition, he directed the BYU Biomedical Imaging Lab, and performed research on scanning impedance imaging. He has done consulting work since 1997 in laser scattering off of semiconductors, sparse matrix calculations for search engines, and mesh transformations for fluid dynamics. Dr. Oliphant served as President of Enthought from 2007 until 2011, where he oversaw the establishment of additional satellite offices in New York City, Belgium, Cambridge UK, and Mumbai, India. During this time, he worked with Fortune 50 companies such as Shell, J.P. Morgan, and Proctor and Gamble in all aspects of the contractual relationship – from contracts to training to code architecture and code development. He also served on the Board of Directors for Enthought from 2008 until 2011, and during that time, formed strong connections with J.P. Morgan technical leadership staff and other industry leaders.
Travis Oliphant

Fernando Pérez

Fernando Pérez received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Colorado and did his post-doctoral work there in applied mathematics, working on fast algorithms for partial differential equations.

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He is currently a research scientist at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, focusing on the development of new analysis methods for brain imaging problems and high-level scientific computing tools. Towards the end of his graduate studies, he became involved with the development of Python tools for scientific computing. He started the open source IPython project in 2001 when he needed an efficient interactive workflow for everyday scientific tasks. He continues to lead IPython, as part of a growing team of talented developers. He remains committed to the development of open, high-level tools to tackle the current challenges in computationally-based scientific research and education across disciplines. He is a member of the matplotlib development team and has contributed to numpy, scipy, sympy, mayavi, nipy and nitime. He regularly organizes workshops and lectures aimed at teaching the use of these tools to audiences at levels ranging from high-school students to research scientists. He is also a member of the Python Software Foundation. When not glued to a computer, Fernando tries to spend as much time as possible with his wife outdoors hiking and backpacking, as well as climbing.
Fernando Pérez

Tom Pologruto

Thomas Pologruto is a Senior Managing Director in the Blackstone Technology and Innovations group and serves as the firm’s Chief Data Architect as well as the Chief Technology Officer of Liquid Markets Technology (BAAM, BXC, BIS, BREDS and Harvest) and Data Science.

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As Chief Data Architect, Mr. Pologruto is focused on bringing advanced data analytics, warehousing and visualization to all of the Blackstone corporate and investment teams, and across our liquid markets, he leads the group’s software engineering teams, which develop proprietary investment and allocation tools, trading platforms and risk systems. He was previously the Chief Technology Officer of the Hedge Fund Solutions group. Before joining Blackstone in 2019, Mr. Pologruto was a Quantitative Researcher and Senior Portfolio Manager at Kepos Capital. Prior to Kepos, he was the Chief Technology and Research Officer at Capstone Investment Advisors. Mr. Pologruto graduated cum laude and with distinction from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Physics, Biochemistry and Biophysics as well as with a MS in Chemistry. Mr. Pologruto received a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University.

Tom Pologruto

Gabriela de Queiroz

Gabriela de Queiroz is a Principal Cloud Advocate Manager at Microsoft. She leads and manages the Global AI/ML/Data team in Education Advocacy.

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Previously she was a Program Director working on Open Source, Data & AI Technologies at IBM. She is the founder of AI Inclusive, a global organization that is helping increase the representation and participation of gender minorities in Artificial Intelligence. She is also the founder of R-Ladies, a worldwide organization for promoting diversity in the R community with more than 200 chapters in 55+ countries. She has worked in several startups and where she built teams, developed statistical models, and employed a variety of techniques to derive insights and drive data-centric decisions.

Gabriela de Queiroz

Peter Wang

Peter has been developing commercial scientific computing and visualization software for nearly 20 years. He has extensive experience in software design and development across a broad range of areas, including 3D graphics, geophysics, large data simulation and visualization, financial risk modeling, and medical imaging.

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Peter’s interests in the fundamentals of vector computing and interactive visualization led him to co-found Anaconda (formerly Continuum Analytics). As CTO at Anaconda, Peter leads the open source and community innovation group.

As a creator of the PyData community and conferences, he devotes time and energy to growing the Python data science community and advocating and teaching Python at conferences around the world. Peter holds a BA in Physics from Cornell University.

Peter Wang

Michael Zargham

Dr. Zargham is the founder and Chief Engineer at BlockScience, as well as a core member of the Metagovernance Project. He holds a PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on Optimal Dynamic Resource Allocation Policies.

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Zargham has over 15 years of experience designing algorithmic policies in a wide range of domains (including adtech, fintech, and cyberphysical systems). His ongoing focus is optimization and control of socio-technical infrastructures with an emphasis on participatory governance. Zargham’s research focus is on Generalized Dynamical Systems with special attention to systems whose state spaces contain non-numerical data; he is the architect of the open source python package cadCAD (complex adaptive dynamics computer-aided design) and has contributed to SourceCred, Gitcoin, Filecoin, The Graph and many other public protocols. In addition to designing mechanisms at BlockScience, he contributes to the discourse on digital commons with attention to the oversight of algorithms by humans subjected to decisions by those algorithms as part of the Metagovernance Project.

Michael Zargham

Andy Terrel

Andy Terrel received his PhD in computer science at the University of Chicago in 2010. His major emphasis of research has been on the automation of numerical methods on high performance computing resources.

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To this end, he has provided numerous contributions to a wide variety of open source projects, including the popular FEniCS project and SymPy. Dr. Terrel has held roles at universities, government laboratories, and several companies. In all of these roles, Dr. Terrel has been an expert in HPCcomputing as well as an advocate for the open source software movement. Dr. Terrel has served as chair and organizer of many scientific computing conferences including SciPy Conference, FEniCS Conference, HPC^3, and Scientific Software Days. He is an active contributor and reviewer to several scientific computing journals, in addition to being a past NumFOCUS Board Member.

Andy Terrel

Alexy Khrabrov

Alexy Khrabrov is the Open-Source Science Community Director at IBM Research.

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He previously was a Technical Ecosystem Development Lead at IBM Quantum, Chief Scientist at Nitro, an Australian public company, a software engineer at Amazon, and a co-founder and engineer at several Bay Area startups. Dr. Khrabrov is an experienced community steward, builder and organizer, having created and run multiple meetups and open-source conferences in San Francisco Bay Area and around the world, leading with Scale By the Bay. Dr. Khrabrov’s work is focused in community stewardship building distributed systems for ML/AI applications, functional programming, and nurturing partnerships around OSS. At IBM he started Open-Source Science, an initiative based at NumFOCUS, dedicated to accelerating research around the crucial challenges facing humanity with Open-Source Software and Open Data.

Alexy Khrabrov

Nathan Epstein

Nathan Epstein is a software engineer and data scientist at Holocene Advisors, LP. He works in quantitative investment research following earlier roles at Bloomberg and Wealthsimple. He has published academic research, authored open source software, and delivered talks at various global conferences and meet-ups. 

Nathan Epstein