DJ Patil
DJ Patil is an entrepreneur, investor, scientist, and leader in public policy. He has held senior roles in industry, academia, and government and his work has been featured in two Michael Lewis books (The Fifth Risk and Premonition). As a General Partner at GreatPoint Ventures he focuses on building companies in healthcare, enterprise technologies, and national security.
Notable early stage investments include Figma, Confluent, Ola in India, Monte Carlo, Chronosphere, Sumologic, RelateIQ, Peoplehood, and Rebellion Defense.
He is a board member for Devoted Health where he was an executive on the founding team and CTO with the mission to build a health care system that takes care of every member like they were family. Previously he led the product teams at RelateIQ which was acquired by Salesforce, and was founding board member for Crisis Text Line which works to use new technologies to provide on demand mental and crisis support. At LinkedIn he was Chief Scientist, Chief Security Officer and led the data efforts which included recommendation systems like People You May Know, Who Viewed My Profile, and Jobs You May Like; new technologies like Kafka; co-coining the term Data Scientist. He has also held a number of roles at Skype, PayPal, and eBay.
Dr. Patil public policy work includes being appointed by President Obama to be the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist where his efforts led to the establishment of nearly 40 Chief Data Officer roles across the Federal government. Establishing new health care programs including the Precision Medicine Initiative (now the NIH All of Us program) and the Cancer Moonshot, new criminal justice reforms including the Data-Driven Justice and Police Data Initiatives that cover more than 94 million Americans, as well as leading the national data efforts. He also has been active in national security and for his efforts was awarded by Secretary Carter the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service which is the highest honor the department bestows on a civilian.
He is a member of the Defense Science Board and a member of the Board of Visitors for National Defense University. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and CTO for the Biden-Harris Transition where he led development of technology related policies.
As a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, his research focused on nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory and he helped start a major research initiative on numerical weather prediction. As an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow for the Department of Defense, Dr. Patil directed new efforts to leverage social network analysis and the melding of computational and social sciences to anticipate emerging threats to the US. He has also co-chaired a major review of US efforts to prevent bioweapons proliferation in Central Asia and co-founded the Iraqi Virtual Science Library (IVSL). And if you’ve read this far, he barely graduated from high school because of his math grades.
More details can be found on his LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dpatil and can be followed on twitter @dpatil.