creators

Daphne Koller — insitro CEO, Coursera co-founder

Daphne Koller founded insitro in 2018 and is its CEO. She co-founded Coursera, taught at Stanford for 18 years, and is a MacArthur Fellow and an NAS member.

Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She took a BSc and MSc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD at Stanford under Joseph Halpern, joined the Stanford computer science faculty in 1995 and held the Rajeev Motwani chair; her company's bio says she served on the faculty for 18 years. Her work on probabilistic graphical models shaped modern machine learning. In 2012 she co-founded Coursera with Andrew Ng and was co-CEO and then president; insitro's biography of her says Coursera has reached more than 100 million learners. She was chief computing officer at Calico, Alphabet's longevity company, from 2016 to 2018. She founded insitro in 2018 and is its CEO. The South San Francisco company pairs machine learning with high-throughput biology to find and develop drugs; it works with Eli Lilly and Bristol Myers Squibb and hired a chief medical officer in September 2026 as it moves toward the clinic. She remains an adjunct professor at Stanford. Her honours include a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing, the National Academy of Engineering in 2011, the National Academy of Sciences in 2023 and TIME's 2024 list of the most influential people in AI.

Specialization

machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, AI drug discovery, online education

Country

United States