Nobel Week Dialogue

Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller is CEO and founder of insitro, a data-driven drug discovery and development company, and co-founder of Coursera, the largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Daphne Koller is CEO and founder of insitro, a data-driven drug discovery and development company using machine learning and high-throughput biology to transform the way drugs are discovered and delivered to patients. She was also the co-founder, co-CEO, and president of Coursera, the largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Koller was the Rajeev Motwani professor of computer science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years. She has also been chief computing officer of Calico, an Alphabet company in the healthcare space. She is the author of over 200-refereed publications appearing in publications such as Science, Cell, and Nature Genetics.

Koller was recognised as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2012 and Newsweek’s 10 most important people in 2010. She has been honoured 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, and the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008. Koller was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and of the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017. Her teaching was recognised via the Stanford Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research, and as a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.