David Blei is a professor of statistics and computer science at Columbia University, and a member of the Columbia Data Science Institute. His research is in statistical machine learning, involving probabilistic topic models, Bayesian nonparametric methods and approximate posterior inference with massive data. He works on a variety of applications, such as text, images, music, social networks, user behavior and scientific data. Blei has received several awards for his research, including a Sloan Fellowship (2010), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2011), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2011), Blavatnik Faculty Award (2013), ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2013) and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is a fellow of the ACM and the IMS.