Mike Cafarella is a computer scientist specializing in database management systems.

[1] Before coming to MIT, he was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2020.

Along with Doug Cutting, he is one of the original co-founders of the Hadoop and Nutch open-source projects.

[2][3] Cafarella was born in New York City but moved to Westwood, MA early in his childhood.

[4] He was also involved in several notable start-ups, including Tellme Networks,[5] and co-founder of Lattice Data, which was acquired by Apple in 2017.