Lauren 'Lorny' Pfeifer is an operator, data scientist and venture capital investor. Currently she's a Community Manager at NEAR Protocol, a blockchain infrastructure startup in the Web 3.0 space and Venture Partner at Maschmeyer Group Ventures. She is also the Founder of the Web3 Community Collective, a professional and educational network of community professionals in Web3.
Prior to working in Web3, Lorny worked as a data scientist for 2 open source startups along with being a major contributor to Omdena projects. As a data scientist, her work focuses predominantly on racial equity in image data as well as computer vision applications in the health and climate spaces. Her research has been presented at the LatinX in AI workshop at NeurIPS 2020 and the National Institute of Health’s Working Group for Tick Borne Diseases.
Prior to data science, Lorny spent 5 years as a venture capital investor investing in startups focusing on artificial intelligence and digital health at 500 Startups and Maschmeyer Group Ventures. She is a champion for diversity and inclusion and was an original founder of LatinX in VC, an early contributor to LatinX in AI and one of the Founding Members of the AI Future Lab, an action tank and global community of next-gen leaders in artificial intelligence. She is also an artist and musician with much of her artwork focusing on the relationships between humans and machine and generative art. She is a Fulbright Alumna, a 2018 USF Data Institute’s Deep Learning Diversity Fellow and NASA NCAS Scholar Alumna at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Institute. She’s an active member of the Global Shapers Community and was one of WEF’s Davos 50 for 2021 through her contributions towards the Davos Labs Dialogues.
