DJ Patil

About

DJ Patil Bio

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 policy 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.