Kirk Borne

DR. KIRK BORNE is the principal data scientist for Booz Allen Hamilton (since 2015) within the NextGen Analytics and Data Science account of the Strategic Innovation Group. He is an internationally recognized speaker, author, researcher, teacher, adviser, and thought leader in data science disciplines (databases, data mining, machine learning, modeling, statistics, data ethics, and data-driven applications). He has over thirty years of professional experience in roles associated with management...See more

DR. KIRK BORNE is the principal data scientist for Booz Allen Hamilton (since 2015) within the NextGen Analytics and Data Science account of the Strategic Innovation Group. He is an internationally recognized speaker, author, researcher, teacher, adviser, and thought leader in data science disciplines (databases, data mining, machine learning, modeling, statistics, data ethics, and data-driven applications). He has over thirty years of professional experience in roles associated with management, research, and discovery within large data systems. He earned a PhD in Astronomy at Caltech, and received a BS in Physics summa cum laude at Louisiana State University. He spent twelve years as professor of astrophysics and computational science at George Mason University (GMU) in the graduate and undergraduate data science programs. He was co-creator of the world's first data science BS degree program (at GMU). He advised seven completed PhD dissertations in data science, computational informatics, and astronomy. Before that, he worked eighteen years on various NASA contracts - as research scientist, as a manager on a large science data system contract, and as the Hubble Telescope Data Archive project scientist. Kirk is a member of advisory boards for several firms in areas related to data science, analytics, and big data applications and services, and is on the editorial board of several journals related to informatics, data science, and computing. He has worked with numerous businesses (large and small) and federal agencies, where he has applied his expertise in science and large data systems as a consultant and adviser, focusing on the use of data for discovery, decision support, and innovation across many different domains and industries. He has contributed over two hundred conference talks worldwide, and has been an invited (and/or keynote) speaker for over two hundred additional events (conferences, meetups, universities, and organizations). He has published over two hundred papers (including more than sixty peer-reviewed publications). He is the originator of the field of Astroinformatics (data science for astronomy) and contributes to data science development within numerous organizations (public, private, federal, and nonprofit) to enhance data literacy and data science skills in the next-generation workforce. Dr. Borne is also a blogger (rocketdatascience.org) and actively promotes data literacy for everyone by disseminating information related to data science and analytics on social media, where he has been named consistently since 2013 among the top worldwide influencers in big data and data science. In 2016, he was identified as the number-one worldwide influencer in big data, the number-two influencer in data science and machine learning, and a top-twenty influencer in the Internet of Things. You can follow him on Twitter at @KirkDBorne. See less