Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller was born in 1968 in Jerusalem

Koller was born in Jerusalem in 1968. Her father, Dov Koller, was a professor of botany at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her grandfather, Alexander Koller, founded and ran the Balfour and Ohel Shem gymnasiums.

At 12 she took a programming course in BASIC and then asked to enroll at university. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from the Hebrew University in 1985 and a master's degree in 1986. She completed her PhD at Stanford in 1993 under Joseph Halpern.

After postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Stanford computer science faculty. Her research covers representation, inference and learning in probabilistic models, with uses in computer vision and computational biology. In 2009 she published a textbook on probabilistic graphical models with Nir Friedman.

In 2012 she and Andrew Ng founded Coursera, where she served as co-CEO and then president. She left in 2016 to become chief computing officer at Calico. In 2018 she founded Insitro, a drug discovery company that combines machine learning and biology, and in 2020 she co-founded Engageli.

She is married to Dan Avida and is a mother of 2.