Seongjoon Koo

Seongjoon Koo, PhD, who joined KGI in March 2018, is currently the Chief Data Officer at J. D. Power and leads the company’s global effort in data engineering, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to support new and existing data products and services.

He is also leading the company’s academic collaborations with leading academic institutions around the world, such as the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, INSEAD in Singapore, and the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. He currently serves the Forbes Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board as a founding member to provide key insights in Machine Learning and A.I. to the Global 2000 C-Suite.

Previously, he served as the Director of Data Science at Encore Capital Group, one of the largest global specialty finance companies with over a $1 billion market capitalization, and led global data science teams to support the company’s global investment and servicing operations.

Earlier, Koo was a Principal Scientist at CoreLogic, a $4 billion information services company, where he developed numerous machine learning and optimization solutions in the areas of fraud risk, credit risk, and rental value estimation. Previously, he led the quantitative research at a boutique hedge fund in Newport Beach, CA.

Prior to his financial services career, Koo worked at Hologic Inc., a $12 billion medical diagnostics company, and Ionis Pharmaceuticals, a $6 billion pharmaceutical company. His research was focused on the development of data-driven quantitative methods leveraging genomics, pre-clinical, and clinical information for highly accurate medical diagnostics and faster drug discovery.

Koo holds four U.S. patents and 18 academic publications in machine learning, physics, chemistry, and biomedicine. He received his PhD for his research on the nonlinear dynamics of turbulent air flows from the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds BS and MS degrees from Seoul National University in South Korea.