Philipp K. Janert was born and raised in Germany. He obtained a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Washington in 1997 and has been working in the tech industry since, including four years at Amazon.com, where he initiated and led several projects to improve Amazon's order fulfillment process. He is the author of two books on data analysis, including the best-selling "Data Analysis with Open Source Tools" (O'Reilly, 2010), and his writings have appeared on Perl.com, IBM developerWorks, IEEE Software, and in the Linux Magazine. He has contributed to CPAN and other open-source projects. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.