Nicholas Knize

Nicholas W. Knize, PhD, has a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering Mathematics from St. Louis University, an M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Ph.D. in Geospatial Information Sciences from the University of Texas at Dallas. A holder of eight patents and a longtime Apache Lucene Committer and PMC member, he designed the Block kd-Tree and geopoint and shape indexing structures for the Apache Lucene Open Source project. Dr. Knize began his career at Raytheon IIS S&T, where he received the IIS Excellence in Engineering Technology Award. He then spent six years at Elastic.co inventing and developing the Elastic Maps and Geospatial products. As a Principal Engineer at Amazon Search Services, he created the OpenSearch Project, one of AWS's top revenue-generating projects. In January 2024, he founded Lucenia, an enterprise search engine based on Apache Lucene where he currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer.