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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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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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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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.
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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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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NumFOCUS Staff
Leah Silen
*protected email*
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
*protected email*
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.
Nolan Fortman
*protected email*
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 Foster
*protected email*
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
*protected email*
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.
Arliss Collins
*protected email*
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
Kelby Lorenz
*protected email*
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 has a B.A. in Advertising and Public Relations from Lindenwood University and an M.A. in Communication from Drury University.
Tomara Youngblood
*protected email*
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.
Samina Trachier
*protected email*
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.
Lindsay Stecher
*protected email*
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.
Lynn Brubaker
*protected email*
Lynn Brubaker graduated with a Bachelor of Science Business Administration. Before joining NumFOCUS, she worked at a hedge fund as an Office Manager.
Savannah Simons
*protected email*
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.
Chervonne Rogers
*protected email*
Chervonne Rogers joined NumFOCUS in November 2023 as the Bookkeeper. Chervonne has 20+ years of experience in the accounting field and has worked in different fields within operations, finance and accounting in several industries. Chervonne has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Accounting from Regent University in VA and 15+ years of experience directly in bookkeeping. As much as she loves to work, she also loves being a sports mom and a fur-baby mom.
Kamila Stepniowska
*protected email*
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.
Jon Starr
*protected email*
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.
Donovan DelValle
*protected email*
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.
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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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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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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For more information about Jason’s open-source work, see his GitHub account.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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Alexy Khrabrov
Alexy Khrabrov is the Open-Source Science Community Director at IBM Research.
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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.
Amanda Casari
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.