Andrzej Nowak is a member of the CERN openlab CTO office, leading the openlab collaboration with Intel in the Platform Competence Center (PCC). While the PCC focuses mainly on efficient computing solutions for the Large Hadron Collider, the openlab is a broader research partnership between CERN and HP, Huawei, Intel, Oracle and Siemens, with the aim of evaluating and advancing cutting edge IT in a demanding environment. Andrzej has been with openlab since January 2007, when he joined as a Marie Curie Fellow sponsored by the European Commission. Since then, his research concerned high throughput computing, modern parallelism challenges, and recently problems from the Big Data domain. Andrzej also pioneered the educational activities of the openlab: he co-founded multiple teaching series that, over the course of six years, have trained over a thousand scientists and engineers in dozens of workshops, tutorials and international computing schools.