Daphne Koller, PhD

“The time is right to rethink the drug design process using a different and more modern toolkit, in the hope that a new paradigm may help us cure more people, sooner, and at a much lower cost.”

Daphne Koller, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of insitro, a data-driven company leveraging machine learning and high-throughput biology to transform the drug discovery and development process. She leads insitro’s efforts to apply bioengineering technologies to create massive data sets and predictive models that accelerate target selection, design effective therapeutics, and inform clinical strategy.

Koller previously co-founded Coursera, an online education platform that partners with top universities and organizations to offer accessible courses to the public. She was the Chief Computing Officer at CalicoLabs, where she led the development of computational methods for analyzing biological data sets in order to better understand the process of aging.

She has been recognized as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, Newsweek’s 10 Most Influential People, and Fast Company’s Most Creative People. Among her other honors are the ACM Prize in Computing, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Koller received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. She completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She later joined Stanford University as the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science, where she focused on modeling large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty, including using Bayesian networks to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.