Dr. Rachel Schutt, Managing Director is the Head of BlackRock AI Labs along with Professor Stephen Boyd. AI Labs is a central hub to formalize data science efforts and leverage artificial intelligence to solve high priority problems across the firm while driving consistent standards, best practices, and expanding BlackRock's data science community.
Previously Rachel was the Chief Data Scientist of News Corp. There she established the company's first data science team for Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, and other media brands. Rachel was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2015, and is on the 2014 Crain's New York Business 40 under 40 list.
Prior to her role at News Corp, Dr. Schutt was a statistician at Google Research in the machine learning and statistics group. She holds patents based on her work in the areas of social networks, large data sets, experimental design and machine learning.
She is the co-author (with Dr. Cathy O'Neil) of "Doing Data Science"(O'Reilly, 2013), a book that helped to crystallize the emerging field of Data Science. This was based on the "Introduction to Data Science" class she created and taught at Columbia University in 2012, where she was an adjunct professor. She is a founding member of the Education Committee for the Data Science Institute at Columbia. She is on the Advisory board of the Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS) at Harvard University.
She earned her PhD in Statistics from Columbia University, a Masters degree in mathematics from NYU, and a Masters degree in Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research from Stanford University. Her undergraduate degree is in Honors Mathematics from the University of Michigan, Home of the Wolverines.
