He has worked broadly in computer systems for data processing and machine learning. During his PhD at UC Berkeley, Zaharia started the Spark computing engine, which became Apache Spark, and co-started the Apache Mesos cluster manager, as well as other open source software for large-scale data analytics, genomics, and machine learning. At Stanford, Zaharia is a principal investigator in the DAWN project, focusing on infrastructure for usable machine learning. Zaharia’s research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the VMware Systems Research Award, and an NSF CAREER award.