Rob Witoff is the founding Data Scientist of NASA’s IT Data Science Team, a Y Combinator startup founder and the Head of Data Science at Coinbase. He holds a Bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In 2007 Rob founded his first software company and developed the precursor automation software used to found Apigy Inc in 2009.

Rob then joined NASA where he led development on the interplanetary data simulation and visualization software that was used to plan operations for several NASA and ESA satellites including Rosetta. Rob then spent four years leading the Launch & Space Station Systems engineering for the experimental OPALS laser communication satellite, currently in earth orbit where he was awarded JPL’s highest ranking award.

In 2013 Rob merged his Startup, Software and Aerospace work to become NASA's first IT Data Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Rob's team incubated solutions to Big Data problems for space bound explorers, earthborn assets and the people that made them possible.

Rob is currently the Head of Data Science at Coinbase where the open and global economic dataset of bitcoin’s blockchain is analyzed to fight fraud and scale a data-driven company.

Find out more about the work of NASA's IT Data Science Team and check out the latest from Coinbase.