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 books by Michael Lewis: “The Fifth Risk” and “Premonition.” 

As a General Partner at GreatPoint Ventures, he focuses on building companies in healthcare, enterprise technologies, and national security. Patil is a board member for Devoted Health, where he was an executive on the founding team and CTO. Previously, he led the product teams at RelateIQ 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 and Chief Security Officer. He has also held a number of roles at Skype, PayPal, and eBay.  

His 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. He helped establish 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; as well as led 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. 

Patil is a member of the Defense Science Board and 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 policies.

As a faculty member at the University of Maryland, his research focused on nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory, and he helped start a research initiative on numerical weather prediction. As AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow for the Department of Defense, he directed new efforts to leverage social network analysis and the melding of computational and social sciences to anticipate emerging threats.