Matei Zaharia is an assistant professor of computer science at MIT as well as CTO of Databricks, the company commercializing Apache Spark. He is broadly interested in computer systems, data centers and data management. He started the Spark project while he was a PhD student at UC Berkeley, and he has also contributed to other open source cluster computing projects such as Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop. Matei received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his graduate work.