Hamdan Azhar

Hamdan Azhar is a data scientist, writer, and builder. He has worked at Facebook, BlackRock, Cash App, and now Brex, often turning messy datasets into tools that help people see patterns they otherwise might miss. At Facebook, he studied advertising and co-invented a patented system for understanding emoji. At BlackRock and Cash App, he built data products that helped people make sense of complex customer and financial behavior. He later founded PRISMOJI to study politics and culture through emoji and co-founded Muslim Writers Collective, which grew from a New York open mic into a multi-city community. More recently, he has been experimenting with new ways to make large cultural and spiritual archives easier to search, listen to, and explore, while using years of his own personal data to ask what technology can and cannot tell us about a human life. He summited Kilimanjaro earlier this year.