Cathy O'Neil is a data scientist and author of the New York Times bestseller Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016). She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard and taught at Barnard College before moving to the private sector, where she worked for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. She then worked as a data scientist at various startups, building models that predict people’s purchases and clicks. O’Neil started the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia and is author of the blog mathbabe.org. She is currently a columnist for Bloomberg View.