Cassie Kozyrkov, chief decision scientist, Google

I serve as chief decision scientist for Google Cloud, where I help teams unlock the power and beauty in their data by helping them take data science projects from conception to completion.  

I sometimes joke that I’m a recovering statistician. Throughout my formal education, I’ve focused on decision-making from every perspective. To me, data is beautiful, but decision-making is important. And when we put data and decision-making together, it creates something extremely powerful, something that can be used to drive business success and to make the world a better place. So, despite having studied statistics both in college and grad school, putting me in the statistician bucket wouldn’t be a fair characterization. What I’m passionate about is decision-making in all its aspects and statistics is just a tiny slice of that. That’s why I also earned degrees in economics, psychology and neuroscience (and I’m always learning as much as I can about other perspectives on decision-making). 

I worked throughout my studies, always in something related to data or teaching or both. I’ve been a lecturer, an analyst, a clinical trials coordinator, a data project manager, a statistical consultant, an economic analyst, a high school math teacher and a data collection agent.  

When I joined Google nearly a decade ago, I started out as a statistician in our research and machine intelligence group. I quickly realized that there was a lot of great algorithms research, but much less research into how to apply those algorithms effectively - how to stand on the shoulders of giants and make good use of the tools coming out of algorithms research. I want to make sure those beautiful inventions actually get used safely and effectively to make dreams of yesterday the realities of tomorrow. I’m also deeply motivated to help researchers feel like the fruits of their labor are useful outside their academic community. It’s a great feeling when your research gets picked up and applied to making the world brighter.