David Mertz is the founder of KDM Training, a partnership dedicated to educating developers and data scientists in machine learning and scientific computing. He created the data science training program for Anaconda Inc. and worked there as a senior trainer, building the curriculum that taught a generation of practitioners how to do serious data work in Python. With the advent of deep neural networks, he has turned to training the robot overlords as well.

Before focusing on education, David spent eight years with D. E. Shaw Research, an honor he does not take lightly: the team built the world’s fastest, highly-specialized supercomputer for performing molecular dynamics, custom all the way down to the ASICs and the network layer. Working alongside scientists at that scale shaped his conviction that computational science and software craft belong together.

David is also one of the Python community’s long-standing figures. He served as a Director of the Python Software Foundation for six years and remains co-chair of its Trademarks Committee and of its Scientific Python Working Group. His columns, Charming Python and XML Matters, written in the 2000s, were the most widely read articles in the Python world. He has written books for Packt, O’Reilly, and Addison-Wesley, and has given keynote addresses at numerous international programming conferences.