Jeff Dean

Jeffrey Adgate Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. He is best known for his work at Google, which he joined in 1999. He led Google AI from 2018 to 2023 and was Google's chief scientist from 2023 to 2026.[2][3] Dean co-founded the AI research start-up Discovery Loop in 2026.[4] Jeff Dean was born to a family of a tropical disease researcher and a medical anthropologist, who moved the family frequently. However, from the fifth to tenth grade, Dean attended schools in the Twin Cities.[5] Dean received a B.S., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota in computer science and economics in 1990.[6] His undergraduate thesis was on neural networks in C programming, advised by Vipin Kumar.[7][8] During freshman year, Dean met his future wife, Heidi Hopper, who graduated from the same university in 1990.[5] He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the department that would become the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[1] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.[9] Before graduate school, Dean worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for statistical modeling and forecasting of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.[10]