Jeff Hammerbacher

Jeff Hammerbacher grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and studied mathematics at Harvard University, where he was a contemporary of Mark Zuckerberg. After a brief stint as a quantitative analyst at Bear Stearns, he joined Facebook in 2006 at Zuckerberg's invitation, where he founded and led the company's data team during its period of explosive growth. That team built much of the early infrastructure for analysing user behaviour at scale, and Hammerbacher is widely credited, alongside DJ Patil, with coining the job title "data scientist" to describe the hybrid engineering-and-analysis role the work required.

Frustrated by the lack of open tools capable of handling Facebook-scale data, Hammerbacher and colleagues built and open-sourced Apache Hive, a data warehouse system that let engineers query huge datasets using SQL-like syntax on top of Hadoop. That work became the seed for his next venture: in 2008, after a period as entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners, he cofounded Cloudera with Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah and Mike Olson, aiming to commercialise Hadoop for mainstream enterprises.

As Cloudera's chief scientist, Hammerbacher helped steer the company from a startup selling support for open-source big-data tools into a publicly traded enterprise software firm (Cloudera listed on the NYSE in 2017 and later merged with Hortonworks). His technical leadership and public advocacy for open, scalable data infrastructure made Cloudera one of the defining companies of the "big data" era of the 2010s.

In parallel with his technology career, Hammerbacher has pursued an interest in computational biology, taking a faculty position at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he has worked on applying data science methods to cancer genomics and biomedical research. He has also been involved in Related Sciences, a venture studio building biotechnology companies, and, with his wife, entrepreneur Halle Tecco, runs the angel investment vehicle Techammer, backing early-stage health and data startups.

Hammerbacher's career traces the arc of modern data science: from building the analytics engine of a social network reaching a billion users, to open-sourcing the tools that let the rest of the industry do the same, to applying those same methods to biomedicine. Forbes has repeatedly named him among the world's most influential data scientists for this breadth of impact.