Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller is CEO and founder of insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery and development company transforming the way drugs are discovered and delivered to patients. She was the co-founder, co-CEO, and president of online education platform Coursera, the largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), which has reached over 100 million learners worldwide. She is also the co-founder of Engageli, an interactive digital learning platform aimed at improving learning outcomes. Daphne was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of computer science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years, and where she remains an adjunct faculty member. She was formerly chief computing officer of Calico, an Alphabet company in the healthcare space. She is the author of over 300 refereed publications appearing in venues such as Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, NeurIPS and ICML, with an h-index of over 150. Daphne was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2012 and Newsweek’s 10 most important people in 2010.

She has been honored with multiple awards and fellowships during her career including the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008, the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2019, the IEEE CS Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer award and the AnitaB.org Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner in 2022. Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Science in 2023, the National Academy of Engineering in 2011, and elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and of the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017. Her teaching was recognized via the Stanford Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research, and as a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.