DataJoint Appoints Former Flywheel Exec Jim Olson as New CEO

DataJoint, a leading provider of computational solutions for life sciences research, announced today the appointment of Jim Olson as Chief Executive Officer. Olson joins DataJoint with 35 years of leadership experience in technology, healthcare, and startups. At West Publishing, Olson built the first industrial‑scale natural language search engine for Westlaw.com, the leading legal research platform. He was also CTO at West Publishing during the company's sale and integration with Thomson. More recently, Olson has led startups in life sciences including Flywheel, where as CEO he successfully raised over $100 million in capital and grew the business from an idea out of a Stanford University lab into a leading platform for medical imaging research and analysis.

"I am energized to be joining DataJoint at this pivotal time," said Olson. "We're barely scratching the surface of what will be possible once AI can be applied to medical data in a rigorous way. Coherent governance of data, computation, and the scientific process is absolutely foundational. And this is exactly where DataJoint shines."

To realize AI's full potential, we must rethink how research is conducted. DataJoint provides the rigorous foundation labs need to harness AI and unlock new discoveries. Under Olson’s leadership, DataJoint's next phase of growth will focus on three priorities:

• Building Organizational Strength: Investing in infrastructure, talent, and processes to lay a strong foundation for sustainable growth.
• Enhancing Customer Success: Improving usability, fostering deeper partnerships, and delivering enhanced platform capabilities that drive measurable outcomes for our customers.
• Expanding Market Reach: Growing our customer base to include enterprise relationships with research institutions, clinical applications with hospitals, and commercial labs in pharmaceutical companies and CROs.

This expansion of the leadership team enables DataJoint to dedicate critical expertise to the innovation required to enable reliable AI‑powered research. In his new role as Chief Science and Technology Officer, founder Dimitri Yatsenko will apply his deep expertise in AI, data systems, and scientific workflows to advance SciOps – an innovative approach inspired by the DevOps revolution in software. “To realize the full potential of AI, we must reimagine the way research is conducted,” Yatsenko said. “We must enable researchers to design and execute studies in ways that both humans and machines can interpret and act on. And we must enable labs to conduct experiments that can intelligently adapt and learn. This will unlock new understanding of complex systems such as the brain and, in turn, accelerate the discovery of new therapies.”

The research frontier is increasingly a complexity frontier — a progression from studying isolated effects to complex interactions. DataJoint’s solutions enable labs to operate at that frontier today, and to establish the foundation that makes possible the breakthroughs that AI will deliver tomorrow.