World-class consultants & engineers
Work with empathy-first thinkers who bring care and a keen eye to every challenge.

Derek Chang, PhD — Founding Partner
MS, Electrical Engineering
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California Institute of Technology
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 — Founding Partner
The Wharton School
BSE, Statistics, Marketing, Finance
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 — 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 — Chief of Staff
University of Chicago
BA, Economics
BA, Creative Writing
Angela’s focus is bringing clarity to the business core and creating clean, efficient content. 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.

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.

Rachel Grant, PhD — Data Scientist
Stanford University
PhD, Developmental Biology
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Washington University
BA, Biology (Biochemistry)
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.

Audrey Hocs — Data Scientist
Audrey 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.

Raman Shah, PhD — Principal Data Scientist
University of Chicago
PhD, Physical Chemistry
MS, Physical Chemistry
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California Institute of Technology
BS, Chemistry
Raman has a diverse background in chemistry, teaching, and software engineering. His passions for building things and helping people have led him from academic research to Teach For America, an analytics startup, and Capital One. His past projects span the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. In his work, he pays deep attention to detail in statistics and code alike to save leaders money and bring simplicity to their organizations. His hobbies include baking bread, woodworking, birdwatching, and playing the violin.

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.

Pawel Szczodruch — Sr. Data Engineer
University of Illinois Chicago
MS, Mathematical Computer Science
BS, Mathematical Computer Science
Pawel is a data engineer with over 20 years of experience in finance, education, insurance, Internet, and real estate. His passions for programming, automation, and analysis have seen him through projects like pre-trade analysis (fixed income portfolio performance modeling), post-trade analysis (SEC compliant and best execution reports), Five Essentials survey development, and insurance policy and loss models. Most recently, he built backend and analytics systems for Optimizely, and crunched complex insurance policy datasets for Allstate. Pawel draws from his diverse background to consult for all aspects of data engineering, from data analysis to data warehouses and ETL pipelines.
In his work, Pawel values simple, elegant solutions over complex ones. In his free time, he enjoys playing the piano and guitar, as well as learning new things. He is consistently excited by the number of insights one can gain about any subject, simply by studying its data.

Eleanor Thomas — Sr. Analytics Engineer
Harvey Mudd College
BS, Mathematics
BS, 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.