Dhaval Adjodah is a Fellow at Schmidt Sciences focusing on funding artificial intelligence research, applications, tooling. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at MIT building large scale systems for robotics and cognitive science research. His PhD research was on applying insights from social cognition to improve the sample efficiency of distributed reinforcement learning algorithms, inspired by insights from large online human experiments. He also has large-scale software engineering experience building data-intensive pipelines such as the World Bank’s monitoring system to track unemployment as part of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. He was a member of the Harvard Berkman Assembly on Ethics and Governance in Artificial Intelligence.

Earlier in his career, he worked as a data scientist in banking and insurance, consulted on data pipelines for the US Army and Veterans Health Administration, and founded two tech startup incubators, one in Sri Lanka and one in Mauritius. From MIT, he holds a PhD from the Media Lab, a master’s in technology policy from the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and a bachelor’s in physics focused on nonlinear PDE modeling.