Thais Cooke (Translator)

After transitioning from dentistry into data analytics in 2021, Thais Cooke (Linkedin) quickly established herself as a versatile data professional, currently serving as a Senior Data Analyst. Her unique background bridges clinical expertise with analytical thinking, bringing fresh perspectives to data challenges across industries. Thais is the creator of the LinkedIn Learning course: SQL for Healthcare Professionals and an upcoming course on Data Governance with a focus on healthcare.

Thais has shared insights on popular industry podcasts including Data Podcast for Nerds!, Mavens of Data, and How to Get an Analytics Job, and has been featured as a speaker at MDS Fest. Thais is dedicated to making data accessible, focusing on practical solutions that connect technical concepts with real-world applications. When not immersed in datasets and visualizations, Thais can be found buried in books, writing, experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen, or enjoying family time.

Winfried Etzel

An increasingly prominent voice in the global data community, Winfried Etzel champions Data Governance, Data Strategy, and organizational design. Through his #MetaDAMA podcast and his work building the Nordic data community, Winfried drives professional development across the region. His upcoming book, «Data Governance in the Wild», explores how Data Governance must evolve for distributed landscapes, automation, and AI.

Catch Winfried's insights on the Data Democracy Podcast, Catalog and Cocktails, and his A Journey around the World of Data with Joe Reis.

Alexandra Pasi (Catalyst)

Alexandra (Lexi) Pasi (Linkedin) is the CEO and co-founder of Lucidity Sciences. A mathematician and logician by training, Alexandra has applied that knowledge in a variety of business and technical domains, establishing herself as a dynamic strategist, data leader, and ML innovator. She completed her PhD in Mathematics at Baylor University, receiving the Outstanding Dissertation Award for her interdisciplinary work in logic and formal systems. Her work in machine learning began in 2011, with theoretical and applied research in kernel learning methods. With a group of collaborators, she expanded on that work to develop a novel, general-purpose, highly-scalable ML approach - one which significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ensemble solutions in accuracy, latency, and compactness. With her team at Lucidity Sciences, she has brought that same technology to market with successful applications in various industries from medicine to finance.

Check out Alexandra's 2024 interview on The Joe Reis Show (spotify), her recent interview on The Applied AI Podcast (spotify / youtube), and her recent interview on Working / Broken (spotify).

Juan Sequeda (Synthesizer)

Dr. Juan Sequeda is a Principal Fundamental Researcher at ServiceNow, joining through the acquisition of data.world. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. Juan's research and industry work has been on the intersection of data and AI, with the goal to reliably create knowledge from inscrutable data, specifically designing and building Knowledge Graph for enterprise data and metadata management. Juan is the co-author of the book "Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graph" and the co-host of Catalog and Cocktails, an honest, no-bs, non-salesy data podcast. Juan serves as a strategic and innovation bridge across Product/Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Customer, ensuring technical insights are aligned with business value.

Juan has researched and developed technology on semantic data virtualization, graph data modeling, schema mapping and data integration methodologies. He pioneered technology to construct knowledge graphs from relational databases starting in the mid 2000s, resulting in W3C standards, research awards, patents, software and his startup Capsenta acquired by data.world in 2019. Juan strives to build bridges between academia and industry as former co-chair of the LDBC Property Graph Schema Working Group, member of the LDCB Graph Query Languages task force, standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Juan continues to be an active member of the scientific community through academic research partnerships, advising students, and member of data and AI scientific conference committees.

Kierra Dotson

By day, Kierra Dotson (Linkedin) wrangles Kubernetes clusters at IBM's Cloud VPC platform. By night, she's on a mission to help professionals across all disciplines discover data as their secret weapon for career growth and organizational impact. With a diverse background spanning roles as an HR Data Architect at Charles Schwab and Chewy, a BI Developer at Acxiom, a Data Engineer at Visa, and a cloud and DevOps engineer at a major cloud company, Kierra works to bridge the gap between infrastructure and data/AI engineering.

As the CEO and founder of The Data Bloq, Kierra provides cutting-edge data and GenAI strategy consulting, empowering organizations to harness the full potential of their data assets. Her impact extends far beyond corporate environments; Kierra has conducted over 150 tech consultations and resume revamps via The Data Bloq, helping professionals secure over $250,000+ in salary increases. Follow Kierra at The Data Conversationalist.

Bill Inmon

Bill Inmon (Wikipedia / LinkedIn) is an American computer scientist, recognized by many as the father of the data warehouse. Inmon wrote the first book, held the first conference, wrote the first column in a magazine and was the first to offer classes in data warehousing. Inmon created the accepted definition of what a data warehouse is - a subject oriented, nonvolatile, integrated, time variant collection of data in support of management's decisions. Bill is among the most prolific and well-known authors in the big data analysis, data warehousing and business intelligence arena. In addition to authoring more than 50 books and 650 articles, Bill has been a monthly columnist with the Business Intelligence Network, EIM Institute and Data Management Review. In 2007, Bill was named by Computerworld as one of the "Ten IT People Who Mattered in the Last 40 Years" of the computer profession.

Jessica Talisman (Wayfinder)

Jessica Talisman is a taxonomist, information architect, and professional data wrangler. Over her 25 years of experience in the information & data architecture world, Jessica has worked as an academic librarian and for The US Department of Justice, Overstock.com, Pluralsight and Amazon. She currently works as a Senior Information Architect for Adobe. Jessica holds a Master of Library and Information Science and a Masters in Teaching.

Check out Jessica's recent interviews on the Monday Morning Data Chat, Discovering Data, Knowledge Graph Insights, Blueprints for Success, Catalog and Cocktails, Data Dialogues, Data Democracy, The AI Digest, and How AI is Built.

Serg Masís

Serg Masís (LinkedIn) is a Climate and Agronomic Data Scientist at Syngenta, a leading agribusiness company with a mission to improve global food security. Whether it pertains to leisure activities, plant diseases, or customer lifetime value, Serg is passionate about providing the often-missing link between data and decision-making. Serg is author of Interpretable Machine Learning with Python, now in its 2nd edition. Serg is also working on two upcoming titles: DIY AI: Step-By-Step Artificial Intelligence Projects for Makers and Hackers, and Building Responsible AI with Python. Learn more at Serg.ai.

Annie Nelson (Facilitator)

Annie Nelson is a Data Analyst at GitLab, content creator, and author of How to Become a Data Analyst. She has a background in psychology, and was previously a nanny and an occupational therapist before teaching herself data analytics and switching careers. Annie now creates content about data careers, when she's not working, traveling, or spending time outdoors.

Check out her interview with John David Ariansen on the How to Get an Analytics Job Podcast, and her YouTube channel: Annie's Analytics.

Matthew Mullins

Matthew Mullins (Linkedin) has spent over 20 years at the intersection of government and enterprise, building and delivering data solutions that drive informed decision-making. Currently CTO and co-founder at Coginiti, the collaborative data operations platform, Matthew leads the product and engineering teams. With deep expertise in data strategy, analytics, and technology implementation, he has helped organizations harness the power of data to solve complex challenges. If he's not solving data challenges, you'll find him floating or standing in a river fly fishing.

Shachar Meir

Shachar Meir is a Data Executive with 20+ years of experience scaling data teams and driving growth at global organisations. He has built and led high-performing data and analytics teams at both high-growth startups (WorldRemit, Pontis) and industry leaders (PayPal, Meta). As Director of Data Engineering at Meta, Shachar led Trust and Safety data initiatives overseeing critical infrastructure that protected billions of users, and served as the London Data Engineering site lead. Today as a Data Advisor, Shachar helps companies unlock growth through data via strategic initiatives, org development, and transformation programs. Outside of work, Shachar enjoys quality time with his family, cooking, and flying airplanes and helicopters.

Ryan Boyd

Bio to come.

Trey Blalock

A highly respected Chief Information Security Officer and security researcher, Trey Blalock (Linkedin) has performed extensive work in almost every security domain for some of the world's largest corporations and governments. Trey has trained thousands of people on advanced security topics, and has taught security classes at many organizations - including AT&T, BCBS, BECU, CIA, CISA, DHS, DIA, FBI, IBM, NSA, RCMP, T-Mobile, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Marines, U.S. Navy, U.S. Secret Service. He has served as a Computer Forensic Expert Witness for the U.S. Department of Justice on multiple cases, including handling all aspects of computer forensics on some high-profile cases such as "Donald Vance vs. Donald Rumsfeld," "John Doe vs. Donald Rumsfeld" and "American Boat Company vs. United States."

As Chief Information Security Officer for Coinstar, Trey managed several teams across multiple projects during a major overhaul of the company's infrastructure, architecting significant changes to protect over 25,000 kiosks and data operations on several cloud platforms, reducing the attack surface by more than 95%.

Trey also specializes in defending large-scale systems from advanced threat actors, and currently serves on several forensic, red teaming, and penetration testing advisory boards. Through his consulting practice, Verification Labs, Trey has managed hundreds of security events for companies, including dozens of ransomware events, security breaches, denial-of-service attacks, and over one hundred forensic incidents.

Ryan Dolley (Instigator)

Ryan Dolley is Vice President of Product Strategy at GoodData, and one half of the Super Data Brothers. Check out his discussion on the evolution of BI and moving beyond dashboards on a recent episode of the Joe Reis Show.

Scott Haines

Bio to come.

Karl-Ivo Sokolov

Bio to come.

Tim Frazer

Tim Frazer was working in a grocery store in Vancouver, doing logistics and operations, when he found himself at a gathering of biostatisticians and watched one of the pioneers of Python demonstrate what a package could do. He remembers the thought exactly: he could stop treating his spreadsheets as the work and start treating them as inputs. He had been automating them out of impatience for years without knowing that was a job.

He is homeschooled and self-taught - no computer science degree, no bootcamp - and he got there through books, ERP systems, kitchens, and asking a great many questions. A few years later he talked his way into a role at a New York startup by learning Ruby on Rails fast, noticed the data team next door solving more interesting problems, and discovered there was a title for what he had already been doing. Today he is Director of Data Engineering & Analytics at Trust & Will, running a lean team and leading a migration to an Apache Iceberg lakehouse. He tends to get called in when a data team or platform is struggling to keep up, or doesn't know where to start.

Tim thinks about architecture the way he thinks about a plate - the ingredients, how they come together, and the fact that too many spices ruin it. He writes about the self-taught path at Self-Taught Engineer, taught data and Python at BrainStation for three years, has coached well over a hundred engineers and analysts, and still mentors someone new most weeks.