DJ Patil

DJ Patil is an entrepreneur, investor, scientist, and public policy leader. He has held senior roles in industry, academia, and government, and his work has been featured in two Michael Lewis books. Some of Dr. Patil's notable early-stage investments include Figma, Confluent, Ola in India, Monte Carlo, Chronosphere, Sumologic, Peoplehood, RelateIQ, and Rebellion Defense.

Dr. Patil is a board member of Devoted Health, where he was a member of the founding team and CTO with the mission to build a healthcare 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 a 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 and 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.

Dr. Patil's public policy work includes being appointed by President Obama to be the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, and his efforts led to the establishment of nearly 40 Chief Data Officer roles across the federal government. Additional accomplishments include establishing new healthcare 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.

As a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, Dr. Patil's 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).