Michael Ruddy is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Data Institute at the University of San Francisco. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Nonlinear Algebra group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. His research interests lie in applied algebraic and differential geometry and data science. In particular he is interested in using geometric tools to study objects represented by continuous, discrete, or noisy data and connections to machine learning tasks such as object recognition or optimization.