Robert Kirkpatrick

Director, UN Global Pulse

New York City

Robert Kirkpatrick is a social innovator who has spent more than 20 years in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors working at the intersection of technology, public policy and organizational change. He is the Director of Global Pulse, an innovation initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General harnessing data science for sustainable development and humanitarian action. At Global Pulse, Robert oversees a network of data science innovation labs in Jakarta, Kampala, and New York, which partner with government, UN agencies, academia and private sector to develop data analytics solutions for monitoring, early warning and crisis response. He has been a leading voice in shaping the emerging Big Data for Development community of practice and is widely recognized as the founder and mobilizer-in-chief of the Data Philanthropy movement, in which corporations put insights from big data to work for the public good.