For her PAGE Signature Initiative, Daphne Koller has developed a Coursera Specialization in Entrepreneurship: a new online series of courses for entrepreneurs to help them start and grow their businesses. Since the program’s inception, Coursera has launched more than 50 courses and five Specializations in Entrepreneurship in partnership with top universities such as the University of Maryland, Michigan State University, Universidad de Los Andes, Wharton, and more. These courses are available in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian, with subtitles in more than 15 languages. More than one million learners have enrolled in these Entrepreneurship Specializations and courses on Coursera to date, with strong representation from 174 countries (each with more than 100 learners).

BIO

Daphne Koller (official biography) is the co-founder and President of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with the best universities to connect anyone around the world with the best education, for free.  Coursera is the leading MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platform, and has partnered with dozens of the world’s top universities to offer hundreds of courses in a broad range of disciplines to millions of students, spanning every country in the world.  Her work at Coursera has been discussed in thousands of articles, in venues such as the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, BBC, and many more. Koller was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for 2012, Newsweek’s top 10 most important people in 2010, Huffington Post 100 Game Changes for 2010, and more. 

Prior to founding Coursera, Koller was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years. In her research life, she worked in the area of machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications to systems biology and personalized medicine.  She is the author of over 200 refereed publications in venues that span a range of disciplines, and has given over 15 keynote talks at major conferences. 

She is the recipient of many awards, which include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the ACM/Infosys award, and membership in the US National Academy of Engineering. She is also an award winning teacher, who pioneered in her Stanford class many of the ideas that underlie the Coursera user experience. She received her BSc and MSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Stanford in 1994.