Twitter Loses Its Chief Scientist, Summize Co-Founder Abdur Chowdhury

The turnover continues at Twitter. Following the exit of Biz Stone, the firing of four key product guys, and the departure of a number of early Twitter employees, we’ve learned that another big name has left the company: Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury.

Chowdhury actually confirmed his exit yesterday on Twitter, but everyone seemed to miss it (hopefully because everyone was watching Disrupt). He came over to the service with the Summize acquisition in 2008. He was a co-founder of that search engine alongside Greg Pass, who left his CTO position at Twitter in May. We’re told that all of the original Summize team is now gone from Twitter. (Update: Looks like Eric Jensen and Matt Sanford are leaving today.)

As Chief Scientist, Chowdhury led a number of important data projects at Twitter over the years. He was key in implementing Twitter Search, Recommendations, and Trends. Twitter declined to comment on Chowdhury’s departure.

Chowdhury is also a co-founder of the Alta Vista School in San Francisco and at one point was the chief architect of search at AOL.

While Chowdhury’s departure is a big one, there’s quite a bit of talk out there of even bigger ones. This is all likely related to Twitter’s latest massive round of funding. We’re looking into it. Stay tuned.

Update: As hinted, Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet are leaving Twitter’s board.

[image: @sacca]