As a high school student, Samson Donick was captain of the varsity tennis team and valedictorian of his graduating class. He then attended Stanford University on an academic scholarship, where he played tennis for the Cardinal and graduated with a degree in mathematics.

In addition to his athletic accolades and volunteerism, Donick actively participates in machine learning research and the world of academia. For example, Samson co-authored (first listed author) a paper published in Nature’s Scientific Reports journal titled Uncovering feature interdependencies in high-noise environments with stepwise lookahead decision forests. The paper presents a modification of the data science machine learning random forest algorithm architected by Samson and his co-author for its applications in finance. The paper’s content is now included in machine learning curriculums at multiple universities.