John Hedengren is a Professor at Brigham Young University and leads the PRISM group with interests in combining data science, optimization, and automation. He earned a doctoral degree at the University of Texas at Austin and worked 5 years with ExxonMobil Chemical as an Advanced Control Engineer prior to joining BYU in 2011. His industrial control experience with PLC and DCS systems includes OPTO22, Honeywell TPS/TDC3000, Experion system, OPC, and Modbus. His area of expertise is in process dynamics, control, and optimization with applications in fiber optic monitoring, automation of oil and gas processes, unmanned aerial systems, systems biology, and grid-scale energy systems. He has extensive experience in automation and modeling of the production of polymers such as polyethylene, polypropylene, butyl rubber, and polystyrene as well as specialty chemicals (polyalphaolefins). Gekko and APMonitor software that he developed has been applied in academic and industrial applications world-wide. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in 2018-2019. The online courses at APMonitor.com are accessed by 10,000 learners each day. The Temperature Control Lab (TCLab) is used at 70 universities and by 3000 professionals to learn programming, data science, dynamics, and control. He is the Chair of Control Education for the IEEE Control Systems Society and Communications Chair for the American Automatic Control Council. He teaches short courses on Python for Engineers, Machine Learning, Process Control, and Advanced Control. His 70 publications span topics of data science, machine learning, smart grid optimization, unmanned aerial systems, and predictive control.