David Mertz, Ph.D.

Senior Software Engineer and Senior Trainer Continuum Analytics

David was a Director of the PSF for six years, and remains chair of its Trademarks Committee, its Outreach & Education Committee, and is co-chair of the PSF/NumFOCUS Scientific Python joint working group.

He wrote the columns, Charming Python and XML Matters for IBM developerWorks, short books for O'Reilly, and the Addison-Wesley book Text Processing in Python, has spoken at multiple OSCon's and PyCon's, and was invited keynote speaker at PyCon-India, PyCon-UK, PyCon-ZA, PyCon Belarus, PyCon Cuba.

Before Continuum, David worked for 8 years with the folks (D. E. Shaw Research) who have built the world's fastest, highly-specialized (down to the ASICs and network layer), supercomputer for performing molecular dynamics. He is pleased to find Python becoming the default high-level language for most scientific computing projects.