Charles Elkan was a managing director and the global head of machine learning at Goldman Sachs in New York, and he is also an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Previously, he was the first Amazon Fellow and the leader of Amazon's central machine learning team in the US; before that, he was a professor of computer science at UCSD for many years, with leaves that included being a visiting associate professor at Harvard.

 

Dr. Elkan's research has been mainly in machine learning, data science, and computational biology. In particular, the MEME algorithm that he developed with Ph.D. students has been used in over 4000 published research projects in biology. He is fortunate to have had inspiring undergraduate and graduate students who have become faculty at institutions including Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Washington, or who have become leaders at Google and other major companies.