About

Martin Durant is an expert developer of data engineering software with over 16 years of relevant experience. He is a former astrophysicist, data scientist, and medical imaging researcher who has made significant contributions to the open-source community. As a core developer in the Dask project, Martin has helped create a pure-Python flexible parallel execution engine. He is also a member of the zarr core, a cloud-friendly numerical data storage format. Currently working as a Staff Software Engineer at Anaconda, Martin is responsible for designing and developing proprietary software such as anaconda-cluster, anaconda-enterprise-notebooks, AE5, and conda packaging. He is the lead developer of open-source projects such as Intake, fsspec, and fastparquet, which have millions of downloads. Martin is also a contributor to Anaconda's enterprise proprietary software offerings, AEN and Anaconda Enterprise, and has consulted with third-party companies on the numerical python ecosystem and how to handle big data using the latest technologies. Martin has been involved in training for python programming courses, intensive on-site and remote, numerical python, visualization, and machine learning. He has also been a consultant for external clients and has co-created Anaconda Navigator, the front-end desktop application of the Anaconda distribution. Martin has contributed to pandas, cupy, and other high-profile python data processing software. He is a co-creator of dfviz/xrviz interactive data visualization packages and a maintainer of streamz, which provides real-time data/event processing for Python. Martin's past experiences include working as a Data Scientist at Juice Mobile, where he was responsible for warehousing and reporting of real-time events stream and metadata. He also worked as an Image Processing Researcher at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where he developed a research software framework for browsing, displaying, motion-correcting, registering, and analyzing MRI data from clinical human screening scans. Martin holds a Master's degree in Physics from the University of Oxford and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Toronto. His tech stack includes Python, Software Engineering, Senior Software Engineering, Data Engineering, Research Scientist, Data Scientist, Big Data, ML, Pandas, Frontend, Mobile, Image Processing, SQL, and test.