DJ Patil, who served as the first U.S. chief data scientist, will speak at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) undergraduate graduation ceremony on May 16.
Patil is the dean’s senior fellow and a member of the CDSS advisory board. He is also a general partner at the venture capital firm GreatPoint Ventures, where he aims to build healthcare, enterprise technologies and national security companies. Additionally, he’s a board member for Devoted Health, which he helped found and lead as chief technology officer.
Patil accrued significant public policy achievements working for President Barack Obama as chief data scientist when the position was first created in the U.S. executive branch of the federal government. He helped establish health care programs like the Cancer Moonshot, an effort to speed up discoveries in cancer research, and criminal justice reform efforts like the Police Data Initiative, a data-driven project aimed at improving public safety.
He also held leadership roles at several companies including the relationship intelligence platform RelateIQ and the business and employment-centered social media platform LinkedIn. He previously served as a faculty member at the University of Maryland, researching nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory and launching a numerical weather prediction research effort.
The commencement ceremony will take place May 16 at 2 pm Pacific Time at the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Calif. It will honor students graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science, Data Science, and Statistics in Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024, or Fall 2024.