Lisa Cohen

Director of Data Science & Engineering, Bard & Assistant Google

Lisa Cohen is an experienced Data Science executive, with 2 decades in tech. She has a passion for helping companies leverage data to build products that customers love. She has a strong track record of leading diverse teams, fostering team culture, and delivering impactful results. Lisa is currently the Director of Data Science & Engineering for Google Bard, Assistant and Search Platform. In this role, Lisa and her team are responsible for metric development, product analysis, model evaluation, and experimentation across these products. They work closely with Product, Engineering and User Research to develop data-driven strategies and roadmaps. Prior to Google, Lisa was Head of Data Science for Twitter. She led an organization of 200 data scientists, data analysts and data engineers, focused on driving the strategy and direction of the Twitter product. This included Trust & Safety, Growth, Personalization, Search, Timeline Ranking, 0-to-1 Innovations, and Company-wide metrics. Her team used a variety of DS techniques across machine learning, experimentation, causal measurement and analysis, and partnered closely with Engineering, Product, Design, Research, Legal and Finance. Lisa also represented Data Science on the company leadership team “Bluebird Staff”. Before Twitter, Lisa led a Data Science organization focused on the Microsoft Cloud. Her team was responsible for leading OKRs, informing data-driven decisions, and developing data science models to help customers be successful on Azure. This included customer lifetime value, churn prediction, propensity models, sentiment analysis and more. Lisa and her org partnered with many Azure product and program teams, including Marketing, Finance, Support, Startups, Students, Partners, Marketplace, Fraud, Payments, Capacity and Sales. Lisa worked at Microsoft for 17yrs, and also helped develop multiple versions of Visual Studio. Her first role at MSFT was in C# & VB IDE product management, where she enjoyed creating coding experiences for millions of developers and seeing the impact of the apps they would build. Lisa holds Bachelor and Masters degrees from Harvard in Applied Mathematics. You can follow Lisa’s talks on LinkedIn and read her writing on Medium. She is a board member of the UW Masters in Data Science program, where she helps shape the curriculum for students. Lisa is originally from Los Angeles, and is currently based in Seattle. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with family and friends. Lisa is an avid softball player. She loves spending time outdoors, and you can often find her hiking, camping, swimming, or skiing in the Pacific Northwest. Lisa is also a strong believer in the power of community, and builds communities in her personal & professional life, for moms, alumni, developers, data scientists, managers, mentorships and book clubs.