Daphne Koller
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Daphne Koller (born August 27, 1968) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who is among the most influential figures in applying machine learning to both education and the life sciences. She spent eighteen years as a professor of computer science at Stanford University, where she became a leading authority on probabilistic graphical models, the framework for reasoning about uncertainty that she helped formalize in a widely used textbook with Nir Friedman. [1][2] In 2012 she co-founded the online education company Coursera with Andrew Ng, and in 2018 she founded and became chief executive of insitro, a company that applies machine learning to drug discovery. [1][2]
Koller's career has repeatedly bridged academic research and large-scale commercial ventures. Her early work combined logic and probability into a unified approach to artificial intelligence, an effort recognized in 2008 with the first ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. [3] She has since been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, and she was named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2013) and its list of the 100 most influential people in AI (2024). [2][4]
Koller was born in Jerusalem, Israel, on August 27, 1968, and showed exceptional academic ability from a young age. [1] She entered the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a teenager, earning a Bachelor of Science in mathematics at the age of seventeen and a Master of Science in computer science at eighteen. [1][3]
She moved to the United States for doctoral study at Stanford University, completing her PhD in computer science in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern. [1] She then spent two years, from 1993 to 1995, as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Stuart Russell, co-author of the standard artificial intelligence textbook, before returning to Stanford as a faculty member in 1995. [1] Koller is married to Dan Avida, a venture capitalist. [1]
Koller joined the Stanford computer science department in 1995 and rose to become the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science, a chair named for a late Stanford colleague. [2] Over an eighteen-year tenure on the faculty she built one of the field's most influential research programs in probabilistic reasoning, and after moving into industry she retained an affiliation with the university as an adjunct professor. [2]
Her central scientific contribution was to help establish probabilistic graphical models as a rigorous and practical framework for machine learning. These models, which include Bayesian networks and Markov networks, represent complex systems of interacting variables as graphs and use the laws of probability to reason about uncertainty, drawing inferences from noisy, incomplete, or conflicting data. [3] In 2009 Koller and the Israeli computer scientist Nir Friedman published Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques, a comprehensive reference of more than 1,200 pages that became a standard graduate text in the field. [1][7]
Much of Koller's research applied these methods to problems in computer vision and, increasingly, computational biology, a direction that anticipated her later career. Across her academic career she published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited tens of thousands of times. [2] She was also an early advocate of online education: the probabilistic graphical models course she taught at Stanford became one of the first large open online courses, an experience that directly inspired her next venture. [1]
In 2011 Stanford offered several of its computer science courses free of charge over the internet, attracting enrollments in the hundreds of thousands and demonstrating a broad appetite for high-quality online education. [1] Building on that momentum, Koller and her Stanford colleague Andrew Ng co-founded Coursera in 2012 as a platform to deliver university courses, known as massive open online courses or MOOCs, to a global audience. [1][2]
Koller served as co-chief executive and later as president of the company, helping it sign up dozens of universities and grow to tens of millions of registered learners. [1][2] For their work in democratizing access to education, she and Ng were jointly named to the Time 100 in 2013. [4] Koller left Coursera in 2016, and the company continued to expand after her departure, becoming publicly traded in 2021. [1] Coursera remains one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, and Koller's role in founding it is frequently cited as a milestone in the history of online education. In 2020 she returned to the education sector as a co-founder of Engageli, a platform designed to support interactive teaching and learning over video. [2]
Between 2016 and 2018, after leaving Coursera, Koller served as chief computing officer at Calico, an Alphabet company focused on the biology of aging, where she first applied machine learning to large biological datasets at scale. [1] In 2018 she left to found insitro, a company that sits at the intersection of machine learning and drug development and represents the most ambitious application of her research. [1][2] The name combines "in silico," meaning computation done on a computer, with "in vitro," meaning experiments done in the laboratory, reflecting the company's strategy of tightly coupling automated biological experiments with predictive machine learning models. [1]
insitro's approach is to generate very large, high-quality biological datasets using automated laboratory equipment and then train machine learning models on that data to identify promising drug targets and design therapies. The company has described its platform under names including the Virtual Human, which uses human genetics and functional genomics to build predictive models of disease, and Quantitative Adaptive Libraries for mapping chemical space. [5][6] In January 2026 insitro announced the acquisition of CombinAbleAI, an Israeli antibody-design startup based in Rehovot, and the launch of an integrated platform called TherML, short for Therapeutic Machine Learning, intended to unify the design of small molecules, oligonucleotides, antibodies, and other complex biologics within a single AI engine. [5]
The company has attracted substantial investment and a series of partnerships with large pharmaceutical firms.
| Round | Date | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | 2018 | $100 million | launched the company; investors included Andreessen Horowitz, ARCH Venture Partners, Foresite Capital, GV, and Third Rock Ventures [2] |
| Series B | May 2020 | $143 million | added CPP Investments, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, and Casdin Capital [4] |
| Series C | March 2021 | $400 million | led by CPP Investments [4] |
Its 2019 collaboration with Gilead Sciences focused on a serious liver disease, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and made insitro eligible for up to roughly $1.05 billion in payments across multiple targets. [9] In October 2020 insitro began a five-year collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb to discover treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia. [8] That partnership was expanded on March 23, 2026, when Bristol Myers Squibb nominated two additional ALS targets identified through insitro's platform and insitro received a $10 million milestone payment. [6] By 2026 insitro had raised roughly $800 million in capital, including about $150 million in non-dilutive funding from its pharmaceutical partnerships, and had been valued at around $2.5 billion. [5] As of 2026 Koller serves as the company's founder, chief executive, and a member of its board. [2]
Koller has received many of the highest honors in computer science and has been elected to all three of the United States national academies relevant to her work.
| Year | Honor |
|---|---|
| 2004 | MacArthur Fellowship [1] |
| 2004 | Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence [2] |
| 2008 | First ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences, later renamed the ACM Prize in Computing [3] |
| 2011 | Member, National Academy of Engineering [2] |
| 2013 | Time 100 most influential people in the world [4] |
| 2014 | Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences [2] |
| 2019 | ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award [2] |
| 2023 | Member, National Academy of Sciences [2] |
| 2024 | Time 100 most influential people in AI [2] |
The 2008 ACM-Infosys award citation credited her with combining the previously incompatible tools of logic and probability to create a new approach to machine learning capable of processing large amounts of uncertain and conflicting data. [3] Her election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2023 places her among a small group of computer scientists recognized by all three bodies. [2]