Course Trainer Bios

All of our training courses are taught by Python experts. Our trainers have years of real world programming experience in a wide variety of applications and can tailor sessions to meet your company’s needs.

Travis Oliphant, Ph.D.
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Travis has a Ph.D. from the Mayo Clinic and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University. Since 1997, he has worked extensively with Python for numerical and scientific programming, most notably as the primary developer of the NumPy package, and as a founding contributor of the SciPy package. He is also the author of the definitive "Guide to NumPy".

Travis was an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU from 2001-2007, where he taught courses in probability theory, electromagnetic, inverse problems, and signal processing. He also served as Director of the Biomedical Imaging Lab, where he researched satellite remote sensing, MRI, ultrasound, elastography, and scanning impedance imaging.

From 2007-2011, Travis was the President at Enthought, Inc. During his tenure there, the company grew from 15 to 50 employees, and Travis worked with well-known Fortune 50 companies in finance, oil-and-gas, and consumer-products. He was involved in all aspects of the contractual relationship, including consulting, training, code-architecture, and development.

As CEO of Continuum Analytics, Travis engages customers, develops business strategy, and guides technical direction of the company. He actively contributes to software development, and engages with the wider open source community in the Python ecosystem.

Peter Wang
Co-Founder & President

Peter holds a B.A. in Physics from Cornell University and has been developing applications professionally using Python since 2001. Before co-founding Continuum Analytics in 2011, Peter spent seven years at Enthought designing and developing applications for a variety of companies, including investment bankers, high-frequency trading firms, oil companies, and others. In 2007, Peter was named Director of Technical Architecture and served as client liaison on high-profile projects. Peter also developed Chaco, an open-source, Python-based toolkit for interactive data visualization.

Peter's roles at Continuum Analytics include product design and development, software management, business strategy, and training.

Hugo Shi, Ph.D.
Software Engineer

Dr. Shi has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan studying statistical medical image reconstruction and a BS from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Continuum, Hugo was consulting at an investment bank optimizing parallel computing and data distribution problems, and he consulted on quantitative investment strategies for a machine learning and big data focused hedge fund. Hugo has also developed quantitative strategies and real time risk management tools for Chicago Trading Company, an options market making firm. Before leaving the west coast, Hugo worked on embedded systems for ad-hoc multi-hop wireless sensor networks.

Bryan Van De Ven
Software Engineer

Mr. Van de Ven received undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from UT Austin, and a Master's degree in physics from UCLA. He has worked at the Applied Research Labs, developing software for sonar feature detection and classification systems on US Naval submarine platforms. He also spent time at Enthought, where he worked on problems in financial risk modeling and fluid mixing simulation, and also contributed to the Chaco visualization library. He has also worked on an assortment of iOS projects as an independent consultant.

David Beazley

David is the author of the Python Essential Reference and elected member of the Python Software Foundation. David has been an active member of the Python community since 1996 and is the creator of several Python-related packages including SWIG and PLY (Python Lex-Yacc). In addition to his work with Python, Dave has extensive experience with C, C++, and assembly language programming. Dave has a Ph.D. in computer science and a M.S. in mathematics.

Schedule a Course

To attend a course, please check the corresponding course page to find the next class, or contact us to schedule a private session. Classes are typically scheduled 8-32 weeks in advance and can be held worldwide.