Symposium 2026 | Data to Drive Performance: Wins and What’s Next
Data to Drive Performance: Wins and What’s Next
Leaders from sport, medicine, and tech will discuss how data is already reshaping athletic performance and where we will head next. The panelists bring expertise in team strategy, the role of mindset, and leveraging large-scale and novel data for decision-making, along with lessons from the front lines of professional and collegiate sport.
MODERATOR
Jennifer Widom, PhD
Jennifer Widom is the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering and the Fletcher Jones Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Her research interests span many aspects of non-traditional data management. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an ACM Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award. She is also known for educational outreach, introducing one of the first massive open online courses (MOOC) and teaching in-person data science courses in over 25 low- and middle-income countries.
PANELIST
Shayne Skov
Shayne Skov is a former NFL player and Associate Partner with McKinsey & Company. He now serves as Executive Athletic Director – Strategy, Data & Analytics at Stanford Athletics and is focused on building an Athletic Department that redefines the future of the evolving college athletics landscape.
PANELIST
Billy Eppler
Billy Eppler is the Founder of The Development Arc, a consulting practice focused on decision sciences and sports advisory, with a 25+ year career in baseball front offices. He most recently served as Special Advisor for the Milwaukee Brewers, and previously as General Manager of the New York Mets (2021–2023) and Los Angeles Angels (2015–2020), where he signed Shohei Ohtani. Earlier, he was Assistant General Manager for the New York Yankees and a scout with the Colorado Rockies. He holds a finance degree, cum laude, from the University of Connecticut where he played college baseball.
PANELIST
Alia Crum, PhD
Alia Crum is an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Mind & Body Lab, where she investigates how mindsets and beliefs can shape physical health, well-being, and performance. She has studied how mindsets can be shaped to increase physical activity, performance, and even the physiological response to food.
PANELIST
Akshay Chaudhari, PhD
Akshay Chaudhari is an associate professor of radiology and biomedical data science, and is the Interim Division Chief of Imaging Informatics at Stanford Radiology. His group develops representation learning techniques for large-scale, multi-modal, deep learning models. His work, funded by the NIH, ARPA-H, and several industry partners, has been published in Nature, Nature Medicine, and numerous AI conferences and health journals. He also serves as the Co-Director of Clinical AI at Stanford Radiology and as the Associate Director of Research at the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging (AIMI).
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