When the San Diego Union-Tribune looked for an assessment of incoming White House chief data scientist DJ Patil, the newspaper turned to CSE chair and professor Rajesh Gupta for a comment: "DJ perfectly reflects UCSD's core: young and [on the] leading edge of science." In the article about President Obama elevating Patil to be the first-ever U.S. Chief Data Scientist, the reporter noted that the CSE department, "which has more than 2,500 students, has been straining to meet enrollment demand, partly because of soaring interest in data science."
Patil received his undergraduate degree from UCSD in 1996, but from mathematics, not computer science. At the time, the computer science program was much smaller than it is today. Patil later earned his Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Maryland, where he also began his teaching career. At various points Patil has served in industry, including stints at eBay as a distinguished research scientist, and as chief scientist for social-media giant, LinkedIn. Most recently, Patil was a data scientist in residence at one of the oldest venture-capital firms in Silicon Valley, Greylock Partners.
In his first memo as U.S. Chief Data Scientist, DJ Patil noted that "'big data' has become a regular part of our daily lives. In 2013 researchers estimated that there were about four zettabytes of data worldwide: That's approximately the total volume of information that would be created if every person in the United States took a digital photo every second of every day for over four months!" But Patil was upbeat in hs first official memo, titling it: "Unleashing the Power of Data to Serve the American People." The good news for Patil is that he doesn't have to move. He is already deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Patil has assumed the Chief Data Scientist as well. His most immediate priority is in President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative (tapping medical and genomic data to transition from one-size-fits-all to truly personalized medicine).