Gunnar Carlsson is the President & Co-Founder of Ayasdi. He has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a doctorate from Stanford University. Over the past 35 years, Gunnar has taught at the University of Chicago, University of California, Princeton University, and has been a professor and the Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Stanford, where he has been a thought leader in a branch of mathematics called topology, the study of shape. Gunnar pioneered the applied use of topology to solve complex real world problems starting in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, this work led to $10M in research grants from the National Science Foundation and DARPA to study the application of Topological Data Analysis for problems of interest within the U.S. government.