Michael Wu is the Principal Scientist of Analytics at Lithium Technologies Inc. Michael received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s Biophysics graduate program. His graduate research focuses on modeling the human brain, specifically the visual cortex, with techniques from math, physics, statistics, and machine learning. Currently, Michael is applying similar data-driven methodologies to investigate and understand the complex dynamics within online communities as well as the greater social web. Michael has developed the Community Health Index (CHI) and many predictive social analytic algorithms that bring Lithium closer to its vision of “one portal to manage the entire social web.” To tackle challenging problems like the value of WOM and social media ROI, Michael collaborates with academicians to conduct research on these important topics of social media that are presently unsolved. Michael’s R&D work at Lithium has won him the recognition as a 2010 Influential Leader by CRM Magazine. Michael has been a DOE fellow during his graduate career and was awarded 4 years of full fellowship plus stipend under the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. During his fellowship tenure, he has also served at the Los Alamos National Lab, conducting cutting edge research in machine learning and face recognition. Prior to his graduate research, Michael received his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley triple majoring in Applied Math, Physics, and Molecular & Cell Biology.