Ion Stoica

Ion Stoica is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of Databricks, Anyscale, and Conviva. He earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon and co-directs Berkeley's RISELab (formerly AMPLab), where the Apache Spark and Ray open-source projects originated. He served as Databricks' first CEO before becoming executive chairman in 2016, and his research has produced over 100 peer-reviewed papers in distributed systems and networking. In 2021 he donated $25 million to Berkeley's computing and data science initiatives.