from university of maryland in college park as a doctoral student and faculty member at umd he used open datasets published by national oceanic and atmospheric administration noaa to make major improvements in numerical weather forecasting his first taste of the datagiri so to say he also worked at the department of defense where he is said to have bridged computational science and social science data sets to help anticipate and identify emerging threats to the united states in the years since he has worked mainly in the private sector in such nifty and newfangled silicon valley companies such as linkedin skype paypal ebay etc all of which use big data to advance their insights into consumer and customer behavior and preferences but there no bigger entity than uncle sam and to the us government and washington dc returns dj as its top data scientist which he once described in a harvard business review article as the the sexiest job of the 21st century indeed data scientists a job description that barely existed a decade back are hot hires right now appearing in some 36000 helpwanted ads on linkedin according to one account dj himself wrote a white house blog shortly after his appointment pointing to the transformative uses of data being just around the corner from precision medicine and other forms of smarter health care delivery to individualized education to the internet of things which refers to devices like cars or thermostats communicating with each other using embedded sensors linked through wired and wireless networks and leading the data darbar in what is expected to be a data raj in times to comes dj patil