On an otherwise average day in 2005, Taurean Dyer was driving home from the DMV, when the heavy New York City traffic suddenly stopped and the vehicle behind him slammed into his car. Dyer braced himself against the steering wheel, which caused a brain injury that appeared to put a halt to the aspiring engineer’s soaring educational trajectory.
Dyer, a college sophomore at the time, went from being able to do advanced calculus in his head to struggling to add single digits. He was a natural chatterbox, but lost the ability to put together full sentences. He was also an active wrestler, but now found himself bedridden.
“This is when I learned to fail,” he said. “It’s a lesson that’s stuck with me my whole life.”
Although doctors didn’t expect him to be able to complete college, during the next four years of recovery, Dyer not only relearned the basics, but upskilled and explored his passion for robots, drones, programming and electronics.
He earned his bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and applied math from Stony Brook University in 2012, and, after encouragement from a professor, returned for his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, with a focus in energy technology and mechatronics.
“I just kept doing what I’ve always done — praying and trying to succeed in the face of all odds,” he said.
After graduation, Dyer joined a large global consulting firm’s research lab, where he focused on applying technology to enable digital workforces and organizational behavior, helping employees accomplish critical tasks more efficiently. He earned five patents and presented a project about equitable hiring practices at the White House.
Dyer joined NVIDIA in 2019 as part of the AI infrastructure team, working on RAPIDS, an open-source suite of GPU-accelerated data science and AI libraries.
Now, as a senior technical product manager for data science and AI infrastructure, he helps developers, customers and students understand how they can apply RAPIDS to their own projects.
In a role spanning testing, documentation, user experience and community outreach, Dyer strives to broaden access to technology and help new users understand how they can use NVIDIA technologies to achieve their goals.
“If generous mentors hadn’t guided me, exposed me to new technologies and taught me how to use them when I was at my lowest, I wouldn’t be where I am now,” he said. “I try to pay it forward with my work every day.”
Dyer is passionate about opportunities to bring RAPIDS to underserved communities around the world. In 2021, in his home country of Trinidad, he cofounded PyDataTT, a nonprofit organization within the PyData developer community.
With PyDataTT and other local groups, such as TTLab, Dyer aims to empower Caribbean students and practitioners around the world to succeed in their data science, machine learning and AI projects.
“Sometimes kids’ vision is only as big as the pond they’re in, but I want them to realize they’re good enough to work alongside the brightest minds in tech,” he said. “I never know who this work might impact, and how — we’re just starting to see the ripple effects created by access to technology.”
Dyer’s efforts to broaden access to RAPIDS often yields remarkable results. In a live coding session, engineers who were testing RAPIDS in healthcare applications found that they could quickly identify patterns in how cancer cells transform as they metastasize. What would have taken them months was made possible in an hour, aided by open-source data science tools.
“All they needed was a faster way to get insights from the data that was always there,” he said. “This technology has the potential to change so many parts of the world for the better.”
Follow @nvidialife on Instagram and learn more about NVIDIA life, culture and careers.