Hamdan Azhar

Hamdan Azhar is chief data scientist at Zap.org, a founding member of Bitcoin Center NYC, and the founder of PRISMOJI. He previously worked in ads research at Facebook and was the national statistician on Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. Hamdan is best known for his recent work in emoji data science—analyzing emoji usage to inform understanding of public sentiment about current events. He is also a frequent writer on the intersection of technology and culture and his writings have appeared in Forbes, VICE, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor, among other outlets. He is a public speaker and has delivered invited lectures in 14 countries around the world. Hamdan holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Penn State, a master’s degree in biostatistics from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and spent one year in the Ph.D. program in neuroscience at the University of Chicago.