Meet Your Instructors

We have a great group of instructors for each of the courses of the Nanodegree program. For some courses, you'll hear from just one, and others include multiple instructors. Each of them brings expertise from working in the field and experience teaching others. Below is a short bio of each instructor, and you'll learn more about them during the courses they teach.

Course 1 - Introduction to Data Visualization

Mat Leonard, Instructor

Mat is a former physicist, research neuroscientist, and data scientist. He did his PhD and Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.

Josh Bernhard, Instructor

Josh has been sharing his passion for data for nearly a decade at all levels of university, and as Lead Data Science Instructor at Galvanize. He's used data science for work ranging from cancer research to process automation.

Course 2 - Dashboards

Robert Crocker, Data Visualization Consultant at IBM

Robert Crocker is a Data Visualization consultant with over 7 years of experience leveraging Tableau at places such as First Republic Bank, Charles Schwab, and Pinterest. He now provides solutions to clients all over the world, providing training to professionals and executing projects onsite and remotely.

Course 3 - Data Storytelling

Malavica Sridhar, Senior Product Manager at CircleUp

Mal Sridhar is a Senior Product Manager with over five years of experience. Her work includes building Helio, an ML platform used to identify breakout brands in early-stage CPG.

Course 4 - Advanced Data Storytelling

Ben Jones, CEO of DataLiteracy.com

Ben Jones is the founder and CEO of Data Literacy, LLC, a training and education company that's on a mission to help people learn the language of data. Ben teaches data visualization theory at the University of Washington, he's the author of Communicating Data With Tableau (O'Reilly 2014) and the forthcoming book Avoiding Data Pitfalls (Wiley, 2019). Ben also writes about data topics on his blog DataRemixed.com, and to balance out the digital side of things, he loves hiking and backpacking on the beautiful trails of the Pacific Northwest. Ben holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA (2000) and an MBA from California Lutheran University (2011).