Official Story
Deepna Devkar is Vice President of Data Science & Engineering and heads up the Data Intelligence team at CNN. She works to understand the CNN audience across devices and build recommendation systems that increase user engagement across all CNN brands.
During her career in data science, she has primarily worked in the media industry, both as a hands-on IC (individual contributor) and as a manager responsible for building and leading cross-functional teams.Prior to joining CNN, Devkar started as Vice President of Data Science Products for WarnerMedia, where she led a team of data scientists, engineers and product managers to build scalable data science products across WarnerMedia's brands. Shealso held positions at Viacom and Dotdash (formerly About.com) where she attainedexpertise in the linear TV space and digital media and publishing landscape, respectively. Before her transition into data science, she spent over a decade in scientific research, studying the psychological and neural underpinnings of human behavior.
Recently, she was recognized for her contribution as Folio's Top Women in Media, Corporate Champion in 2018. Devkar has enjoyed working on projects ranging across audience segmentation, content recommendation and personalization, search engine and revenue optimization. She is most passionate about evangelizingdata science and regularly speaks at meetings and conferences. She also regularly participates in events supporting women in tech, management and leadership, and is a founding member of Chief.
Devkar 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 to pursue a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University. She ended up leaving academia but has made New York her new home.
Unofficial Story
Deepna grew up in a small town in West India exhibiting all characteristics of an only child, fitting all stereotypes of an Indian kid: obedient daughter, star student, teacher's pet, addicted bookworm, social conformist, and a spelling bee fan with aspirations of becoming a medical doctor. When she was 13, she moved to Texas with her parents, who quickly started pursuing the American dream, while she struggled through a major culture shock. Over the next decade, she discovered thathuman behavior was more interesting (and less nauseating) to study than the human body. After three degrees dedicated towards research in Psychology/Neuroscience (B.S., M.S., & Ph.D.), she graduated with many accolades, research awards and conference talks, and only 1 first-author paper, 'In Submission', to show for. Several excuses ensued; one of which was terrible choicesof disillusioned advisors. Weiji Ma adopted her in times of much desperation and became a mentor, also advising her to finally cut the umbilical cord from Texas and move to NYC for a postdoc fellowship at NYU (his most convincing argument: "All cool people eventually move to the Northeast."). The security was short-lived. As she witnessed her academic heroes scrambling around for grants, terrifying reality checks began to creep in. The big city had also planted bigger dreams. Some serious introspection, much support from her predecessors, and a lot of luck led her to data science - a field she didn't even know existed a year before she plunged for it.
Five years in, she is Vice President at CNN, leading the Data Intelligence team of about 30 machine learning data scientists and engineers. There are many skills thatshe had to learn on the job (and continues to), including people management, whichis actually the most rewarding aspect of her career. She still gets to work on a variety of fun, challenging problems with smart people and enjoys the ability to drive business strategy to make tangible impact on a quick time scale. During her short tenure in industry, she has learned many important life lessons, one of which has been to accept but ignore her impostor syndrome. Being opportunistic has become her life mantra, as it has been the common thread that connects her dots looking backwards.
Unlike some of her ex-academic colleagues, she does not regret her academic life. When she retires from the "real world", she actually hopes to return to academia to teach whatever she has learned and might be of value. For now, she welcomes all opportunities to convince a fellow despondent academic that there is a world out there, where 95% of us have gone to, found happiness and decent success, even though academia still calls it the "alternative-career" world.
Deepna recently became a first-time mom to a baby boy born at the height of the pandemic in New York City. She truly believes that motherhood gives exceptional superpowers that she wouldn't trade for anything.