Obama’s former chief data scientist, DJ Patil, joins Venrock as an adviser

DJ Patil, the chief data scientist under President Barack Obama, has joined Venrock Capital as an adviser. Patil has long been a proponent of using data science and artificial intelligence to solve some of the nation’s biggest problems around areas including medicine, policing and the criminal justice system.

“My primary focus is building new models to improve healthcare and Venrock is the best out there,” Patil told TechCrunch in an email. “I’ll be helping as they think through how security, data science/ML/AI, etc combine to make new models for improve health outcomes.”

Venrock Capital has invested in companies like Nest, Cloudflare, Dollar Shave Club and Illumina. As an adviser, Patil will work with Venrock’s investment team and portfolio companies around healthcare, security and other areas.