Vanessa Parli is the Director of Research at HAI. She leads the HAI grant programs, research convenings, student groups and “state of AI” reports such as the AI 100 and the AI Index where she is a member of the Steering Committee. Her team also analyzes the effectiveness of these programs to continuously improve HAI’s ability to foster interdisciplinary research collaborations internal and external to Stanford. Prior to Stanford, Vanessa worked in management consulting where she utilized statistics, machine learning and other data science methodologies to advise government agencies, large biotech companies and nonprofit organizations. Vanessa holds an MS in Engineering Management and Computational Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University.