World-class consultants & engineers
Work with empathy-first thinkers who bring care and a keen eye to every challenge.
![Derek Chang, PhD](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Derek-Chang-1.jpg)
Derek Chang, PhD — Founding Partner
PhD, Electrical Engineering
MS, Electrical Engineering
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
BS, Electrical Engineering
Derek is a data scientist and engineer with a background in tech and research. Prior to founding Stratus, he served as a principal data scientist for Lumo Bodytech and a data scientist for the founding team at Optimizely. Derek works across the full skill stack, constructing data pipelines, managing and optimizing data warehouses, building machine learning models, and informing business and product decisions with analytics and predictive modeling. While at Stanford, he designed a temporal imaging system in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In his free time, he enjoys social dancing and is an active member of Danse Libre and Swing Cats.
![Charles Pensig](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Charles-Pensig-1.jpg)
Charles Pensig — Founding Partner
The Wharton School
BSE, Statistics, Finance, Marketing
The University of Pennsylvania
BA, Japanese
Charles is a data scientist, economist, and business translator. Prior to founding Stratus, he served as director of data science for Oak Labs and as a data scientist and analyst for both Optimizely and Jawbone. Charles was assistant director of research for the Wharton School of Business’s Customer Analytics Initiative. As a founding member of three data science teams and an independent consultant, he has worked across multiple industries and companies ranging from tech start-ups to Fortune 500s.
![Peter Olson](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/7463FEA6-BCFF-4D93-B179-32E54DD02726.png)
Peter Olson — Advisor
Harvard University
JD, Law
MBA, Finance
During Peter’s career in law, banking, publishing, and education technology he was CEO for twenty years, including ten years as CEO of Random House, the world’s leading trade book publisher. In 2001-2002 he was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Vienna, and during 2008-2013 he was a professor at Harvard Business School. Peter is married to Candice Carpenter Olson and has seven children. He is a mountain biker and enjoys reading in English, German, and Russian.
Following his career as CEO, Peter became a CEO Coach and Advisor. He works with McKinsey as a Senior Advisor to CEOs, and he also coaches highly talented individuals. His focus in coaching is to design approaches specific to each client, and he emphasizes strategic and tactical changes that can make clients more effective in their careers and happier in their personal lives.
![Angela Ma](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Angela-ma.jpg)
Angela Ma — Chief of Staff
University of Chicago
BA, Economics, Creative Writing
Angela’s focus is bringing clarity to the business core. Prior to joining Stratus, she was an independent content consultant, with projects spanning film, tech, higher education, sales, fintech, and food/beverage, and employers like Facebook and Red Wagon Entertainment. She is a writer; her work has received the Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists, as well as the New Voices in Fiction prize, judged by R.O. Kwon.
![Rachel Grant, PhD](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Rachel-Grant-Ph.D..jpg)
Rachel Grant, PhD — Senior Data Scientist
Stanford University
PhD, Developmental Biology
Washington University
BA, Biology
Rachel is a data scientist with a background in developmental biology, genetics, neuroscience, and biochemistry. Rachel works on projects across a variety of business domains, and brings particular expertise to biological and healthcare applications. While at Stanford, Rachel used experimental studies and computational genomics to study the genetic basis of human evolution and disease traits, collaborating with teams of scientists at Stanford, across the country, and internationally. In her free time, she enjoys a rotation of hobbies including strength training, dancing, aerial arts, climbing, crocheting, and pyrography.
![David Fager](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/davidfager12.png)
David Fager — Data Scientist
Stanford University
MS, Statistics
California Institute of Technology
BS, Mathematics, Economics
David is a data scientist with a strong background in statistics, mathematics, and economics, trained at Stanford and Caltech. He previously worked as a statistical researcher at Stanford’s Palacios Group, developing methods for statistical inference in phylogenetics, focusing on virus evolution and spread. His experience includes teaching advanced statistical courses at Stanford and mentoring students at Caltech. In his free time, David is an avid runner training for a marathon. When not outdoors, David hones his skills in pool and chess.
![Kate Coppess](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Untitled-design.png)
Kate Coppess — Data Scientist
Stanford University
PhD, Physics
University of Michigan
BS, Mathematics
Kate excels at wrangling data from disparate sources and putting it to work through visualizations and dashboards. She has served as a research assistant at several laboratories, applying her skills to subjects ranging from neurological development to laser network simulations to modeling Hernquist galaxies. Kate’s PhD research focused on making the invisible predictable: she derived a theoretical framework connecting magma fluid dynamics and seismic wave generation, allowing volcanologists insights into processes that cannot be directly observed. She enjoys swimming, exploring the Los Angeles food and film scenes, and knitting cardigans for her friends.
![Audre Hocs](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Audrey-Hocs.jpg)
Audre Hocs — Data Scientist
Audre is a data scientist and software engineer with training from Stanford University, Amazon, and LinkedIn. In addition to data science, she has experience in full-stack development and signals processing. In her spare time, Audre is a crisis counselor, a non-gourmet chef, and a part-time plant parent.
![Eleanor Thomas](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Eleanor-Thomas.jpg)
Eleanor Thomas — Sr. Analytics Engineer
Harvey Mudd College
BS, Mathematics, Philosophy
Eleanor is a data analytics engineer with 10 years of experience and a background in quantitative finance and healthcare tech. She has worked across a variety of industries and is passionate about clean and well-modeled data to make generating insights easy and straightforward. She is also passionate about mentoring newcomers to the field and supporting bootcamp students. In her spare time, she loves being out in nature and tending to her animals.
![Yasser Eldeen](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/Yasser-Eldeen.jpg)
Yasser Eldeen — Data Architect
Cairo University
BA, Computer Science
Yasser is a recognized industry expert in business intelligence, data analytics, and information management with over 10 years of experience building data strategies, enterprise data architectures, information management solutions, and data-driven decision support systems.
His background is multi-faceted across strategic business intelligence and data analytics consulting, data product management, and building organizations’ data strategies and roadmaps. He has spent his entire career bridging the gap between data and business decision-making, and he is extremely passionate about helping organizations overcome their data challenges and make better data-driven decisions.
![David Steinore](https://stratusdata.io/wp-content/uploads/David-Steinore-1.jpg)
David Steinore — Staff Data Architect
University of California, San Diego
BA, Computer Science
David is a veteran data and systems engineer with several decades of experience constructing data warehouses and developing engineering teams in the wearables, IoT, computer hardware, banking, finance, and analytics spaces. He is currently a senior data architect at Nauto, an artificial intelligence company that coaches safe driving for fleet vehicle operators. David serves as an advisor to Stratus Data.