Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American computer scientist who spent eighteen years on the Stanford faculty as the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science. Her research centered on probabilistic graphical models, including Bayesian networks, and their application to machine learning and the biomedical sciences. In 2009 she co-authored a definitive textbook on probabilistic graphical models with Nir Friedman, and she won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2004 and the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008.
In 2012 Koller and her Stanford colleague Andrew Ng co-founded Coursera, the online education platform that helped launch the massive open online course (MOOC) movement and reached over a hundred million learners. She served as its co-CEO and then president.
In 2018 she founded insitro, where she is CEO, a company that, in its words, uses machine learning to transform “the way drugs are discovered and delivered to patients.” insitro combines large-scale biological data generation with machine learning to predict which drug candidates are likely to succeed. Koller is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.