Dr. Paul Walker is a Board Member and lifelong engineer, technology executive, and advisor best known as the former CTO of Goldman Sachs, where he was also a member of the Partnership Committee and firm-wide Technology Risk Committee. He formerly served as the Global Head of Risk & Strategy for Prime Services, as well as the Global Head of the Core Strats team — a highly quantitative, engineering-driven group whose primary role is to develop models, trading strategies, and risk management models for some of the firm’s most competitive trading desks using machine learning and algorithmic strategies. He retired from Goldman Sachs in 2015 after nearly two decades at the firm.

Following his tenure on Wall Street, Dr. Walker joined late-stage VC/PE firm Motive Partners in 2017 as both an Industry Partner and Member of the Global Advisory Council (GAC), whose members also include Microsoft Chairman John W. Thompson and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. In parallel, Dr. Walker advises companies & investors on Artificial Intelligence, providing organizations with guidance in business, technology, people, and product strategy. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors at late-stage technology startups OpenFin and Unqork, and previously served as a Board Member at DTCC, whose subsidiaries processed roughly $2.5 quadrillion in securities transactions annually, as well as at the New York Academy of Sciences.

In a previous life, Dr. Walker worked as a physics researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The supercomputing framework he invented for his PhD is still used worldwide to study quantum gravity. Today, he spends his philanthropic energies working with organizations that provide opportunity and social capital to young adults through access to education, science, and critical reasoning. Dr. Walker also remains a prolific open-source contributor, and avid musician. He earned a B.A. in Physics from Cornell University and both an M.S. and PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.