Meet the NumFOCUS Team

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

Samina Trachier joined NumFOCUS in 2021 as the Events & Digital Marketing Coordinator, and as of 2024 is an Events 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Amanda Casari is a Staff Developer Relations Engineer in Google’s Open Source Programs Office, where she leads the Contributor Experience and Open Source + AI teams.

Neal Richardson is VP of Engineering at Posit and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. He is a maintainer of Apache Arrow, along with many other projects in the R ecosystem. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.