1. DJ Patil DJ is one of the most recognizable faces in data science. He is constantly speaking at conference and appearing in the news articles. He is currently Data Scientist in Residence at Greylock Partners. Also, he helped create the term data scientist.
  2. Jeff Hammerbacher Jeff helped build the first data science team at Facebook. Then he moved on to help co-found Cloudera. Now he is involved with helping a Medical School perform better data analysis. Along with DJ, he helped to coin the term data scientist.
  3. Drew Conway A PhD student at NYU and Scientist at IA Ventures, Drew is very active in the data science world. He speaks at conferences, co-authored a book on machine learning, creates Venn Diagrams, and more.
  4. Jake Porway Jake is a former data scientist with the New York Times. He now spends a lot of time speaking about DataKind, a nonprofit organization (he founded) attempting to help the world.
  5. David Smith David is a blogger for Revolution Analytics. He is also a big fan of R. David is working very hard to help others learn about data science by speaking at conferences and hosting webinars.

This post goes along with Top 5 Data Science Gals.