Our Instructors 

Meet Our Big Data Program Instructors and Leadership

The commitment by our faculty and leadership to build an energetic and collaborative learning environment is what sets the Big Data Certificate Program at Cal State East Bay apart from the rest. Our roster of experienced practitioners and Cal State East Bay faculty are experts in their area of focus. Together, they deliver a unique blend of vision, inspiration, and practical skills to challenge your thinking and present new concepts to help you drive innovation, improve performance, and excel your organization to new levels of success. You'll emerge with critical thinking and decision-making skills that you can apply immediately at your organization. Programs presented in partnership with a third-party provider are not taught by CSUEB faculty nor affiliated with a campus academic department. Courses offered with third-party providers are not degree-eligible.​

PAUL SZYARTO

Paul is the founder of PS Group Holdings and is directly involved with over 400 enterprise-wide projects throughout the world, focusing on ERP, PPM, and integration solutions. He focuses on helping with implementation of data management solutions, and has been part of more than 60 SAP deployments over a six-year period.

STEPHAN DICKINSON

​As a Big Data Product Manager with a focus on Hadoop and HDFS, Stephan has 14 years of 
enterprise project management experience and over 20 in the tech field. At the School of Visual Arts, he designed, budgeted, 
architected, and deployed SVA Computer Art’s render farm. Stephan also enjoys teaching 
batch scripting and programming.

ANTONIO ZURLO

​Antonio is a Principle Technical Business Developer with Amazon Web Services, and previous to that, he worked with Microsoft, 
IBM and Goldman Sachs. He focuses on working in the computer software industry 
where he excels in Big Data, enterprise software, PaaS, enterprise architecture, and agile methodologies.

DINO VITALE

Dino focuses on large scale infrastructure design, performance tuning, and managing technical specialists. He also evaluates ROI integration of acceleration technologies and financial product knowledge of 
equity/fixed income derivatives. He is a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect with TD Securities and enjoys speaking among industry professionals.

TED HRUZD

​Ted is an architect and engineer with extensive experience optimizing trading applications for a competitive advantage. He teaches ULL Architectures for Electronic Trading and Algo Trading at NYU. He’s an avid athlete and developed a ML software to accurately guide training to lead to aggressive fitness and sports related goals.

JOHN NIVES

As an Operating Partner with Gridiron Capital, John focuses on Digital and AI Transformation firmwide. Previously with IBM, he was a consultative sales leader for Watson Marketing and Analytics with a team that resulted in over $100M in growth. He also worked with AT&T where he led the explosive growth of an advertising technology venture.​