Miami, Florida, United States
Dr. Rachel Schutt is a Managing Director and Tech Fellow at BlackRock, where she has led AI Labs since it was established in 2018. She has over 15 years of experience in data science and artificial intelligence. Under her leadership, the group uses a broad range of AI approaches—including machine learning, optimization, large language models, generative AI, and agentic systems—applying the methods best suited to each problem. Her team brings together researchers and engineers to conduct AI R&D and translate research into production, developing products, solutions, and engineering platforms used across the firm. She has been deliberate in designing the team’s composition and ways of working, bringing together research and engineering to support both exploration and delivery. The team focuses on the firm’s most important problems, and her work sits at the intersection of research, product development, and real-world implementation. She is the recipient of the 2023 Innovation Award from the International Association for Quantitative Finance, recognizing her work bridging academic research and real-world AI. She has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and to Crain's New York Business 40 Under 40. She was Chief Data Scientist at News Corp, where she built the company’s first data science organization across Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, reporting to the CTO. She also worked in machine learning and statistics at Google Research. She holds multiple patents, and her team has contributed additional patents across AI systems. She is the co-author of Doing Data Science, based on the course she designed and taught at Columbia University—one of the first in the field. She holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Columbia University, an M.A. in Mathematics from New York University, and an M.S. in engineering from Stanford University, and earned her undergraduate degree in Honors Mathematics from the University of Michigan.