Matei Zaharia

Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, educator and the creator of Apache Spark. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, later holding faculty positions at MIT, Stanford University and UC Berkeley. He co-founded the company Databricks in 2013, where he serves as chief technology officer, and his research focuses on data and machine learning systems. He received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2014, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019, the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2023, and the ACM Prize in Computing in 2025.