Travis Oliphant

A Visionary in Data Science and Technology

Biography

Travis Oliphant is an American data scientist and businessman. He is a co-founder of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity in the United States, and sits on its advisory board. He is also a founder of technology startup Anaconda. In addition, Oliphant is the primary creator of NumPy and a founding contributor to the SciPy packages in the Python programming language.

Education

Oliphant has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Mayo Clinic and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University.

Career

Oliphant was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University from 2001 to 2007. In addition, he directed the BYU Biomedical Imaging Lab and performed research on scanning impedance imaging.

He served as President of Enthought from 2007 until 2011 and founded Continuum Analytics (renamed to Anaconda Inc.) in 2012. As CEO, he led the company to raise $24 million in Series A Funding and secured a $100,000 award from DARPA for high-level data-parallel language extension development.

In 2017, Oliphant left Anaconda Inc. and co-founded Quansight, continuing his contributions to the field of data science.

Books

Oliphant is the author of the textbook Guide to NumPy and associated manuals, which are widely used in the scientific and programming communities.