Bio

Deepna Devkar is Vice President of Machine Learning and Data Platform Engineering and heads up CNN’s Data Intelligence team. She works to understand the CNN audience across devices and build recommendation systems that increase user engagement across all CNN brands.

Prior to joining CNN, Deepna has held positions at Viacom and Dotdash (formerly About.com), building and leading data teams in digital media. Before her transition into data science and engineering, she spent over a decade in scientific research, studying the psychological and neural underpinnings of human behavior.

Deepna is a founding member of Chief, a private network of women executives aimed at putting more women in leadership. She was recognized as Folio's Top Women in Media, Corporate Champion in 2018. She has enjoyed working on projects ranging across audience segmentation, content recommendation and personalization, search engine and revenue optimization. She is most passionate about evangelizing data and building the next generation of tech leaders.

Deepna received her Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Texas, and also holds a master's and bachelor's degree in psychology. She moved to New York for a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University. She ended up leaving academia but has made New York her new home.