DJ Patil

Dhanurjay "DJ" Patil is one of the founding figures of the modern data science profession. Trained as a mathematician, he holds a bachelor's degree from UC San Diego and a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, where he later taught before moving into government and industry. In the mid-2000s, working alongside Jeff Hammerbacher at LinkedIn, Patil helped popularise the job title "data scientist," giving a name to a discipline that has since become central to how companies and governments make decisions.

After LinkedIn, Patil built a reputation as a Silicon Valley operator, holding senior product and engineering roles at Skype, PayPal, eBay and Color Labs, and serving as data scientist-in-residence at venture firm Greylock Partners, where he mentored startups on building analytics teams. He also served as vice president of product at RelateIQ, a relationship-intelligence startup later acquired by Salesforce.

Patil's most consequential chapter began in 2015, when President Barack Obama appointed him the United States' first Chief Data Scientist within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In that role he championed the Police Data Initiative, which drew more than 120 law enforcement agencies into publishing use-of-force and stop data, and the Data-Driven Justice Initiative, aimed at diverting people with mental illness away from jails and into treatment. He also contributed to the Precision Medicine Initiative, which sought to harness genomic and health data for personalised medicine.

Since leaving government in 2017, Patil has moved between healthcare technology and venture capital, serving as head of technology at Devoted Health and as an adviser to Venrock, before joining GreatPoint Ventures as a general partner in 2023, where he backs early-stage health and data companies. Alongside Hammerbacher, he co-authored the widely read O'Reilly reports "Building Data Science Teams" and "Data Jujitsu," texts that shaped how a generation of companies structured their analytics functions.

Patil's influence rests less on a single company than on institution-building: he helped define what a data scientist is, demonstrated how data teams could operate inside government at scale, and has continued to advise founders on turning data into policy and products. He remains a frequently cited voice on the ethics and governance of public-sector data use.