Oliver Zahn

Oliver Zahn has an extensive work experience in the field of data science. Oliver is the Founder & CEO of Climax Foods since 2020. Prior to that, they were the Head of Data Science at Google from 2018 to 2020, and a Senior Data Scientist at SpaceX from 2018 to 2020. From 2016 to 2018, they were the Lead Data Scientist at Impossible Foods, where they spearheaded the Data Science efforts to replace animals as inefficient factories for transforming plants into meat and dairy. From 2008 to 2016, they were the Director of Cosmological Physics at UC Berkeley, where they supervised over a dozen technical projects and contributed to over 30 peer-reviewed publications in major physics journals. Oliver was also a Berkeley Cosmology Prize Fellow at UC Berkeley, where they implemented the full analytics stack in C, Python, and IDL, and introduced a statistical method to accelerate fully optimal inverse-covariance weighting of noisy data sets.

Oliver Zahn obtained a BA & Diploma in Physics from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Mönchen in 1998-2003. Oliver then completed a Diploma thesis in Computational Cosmology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in 2002-2003. Oliver was a PhD student at Heidelberg University from 2003-2007. Finally, they obtained a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics from Harvard University's Department of Physics and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 2003-2008.