Matei is the CTO and co-founder of Databricks and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He started the Apache Spark project during his Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley in 2009 and has worked on other widely used data and AI software, including MLflow, Delta Lake, ColBERT and Dolly. His recent research is about combining large language models (LLMs) with external data sources, such as search systems, and improving their efficiency and result quality. Matei’s research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).