NEW YORK CITY—There's a Big Bang Theory at Reonomy. It's that understanding space of the galaxies in the universe is similar to understanding space on the surface of the earth—at least in terms of creating models to rapidly compare, analyze and reconcile massive amounts of data. (See slideshow at the bottom of the article.)

Maureen Teyssier is the director, data science and data engineering, at Reonomy, a tech company that analyzes commercial real estate data. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in both physics and astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. Teyssier then received her PhD in computational astrophysics from Columbia University. Afterwards, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in computational astrophysics at Rutgers University, where she received the Hubble Space Telescope Cycle 22 research grant.

As an astrophysicist Teyssier would create simulations of the universe on supercomputers. She would perform data transformations to flatten them, take subsections and compare them with other data about the universe. With Hubble Space Telescope images, the scientist would create simulations of what's out in the universe.