Elena Grewal

Who she is today

Elena Grewal, also credited as Elena Tej Grewal, is the founder of Data 2 the People, a data science consulting firm based in New Haven, Connecticut. A January 2025 episode of Delphina's High Signal podcast introduced her as a former head of data science at Airbnb, a lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment and the owner of an ice cream shop, Elena's on Orange.^[1]

Her personal website describes her as a data scientist and community leader who grew up in New Haven, and says she chairs the East Rock Community Management Team. The Yale School of the Environment's faculty directory lists her as a lecturer in its teaching faculty.^[2][3]

Education

Grewal holds a bachelor's degree from Yale, and a master's degree in economics and a PhD in education from Stanford. A UC Berkeley DataEDGE speaker page lists the same degrees. A Stanford engineering profile says her doctoral work included coursework in statistics and econometrics, and that her interest in data science grew out of a study predicting teacher attrition, where data helped her find root causes.^[4][7]

The same profile says she later realised that machine-learning techniques such as logistic regression and clustering overlapped with methods she already used in education research. A Hopkins School alumni profile notes that she graduated from the school in 2002 and pursued her Stanford PhD on how children from different socioeconomic backgrounds interact.^[4][5]

Building data science at Airbnb

Hopkins School reports that Grewal joined Airbnb in 2012 as a data scientist and was the first person at the company to hold that title; a 2015 Berkeley speaker listing shows her then as a data science manager whose team worked on experimentation and data products such as search ranking, the booking experience and host tools. She later became head of data science, leading a team the school describes as more than 200 people. The Hopkins profile says she had left by 2019 and returned to New Haven.^[5][7]

The Stanford engineering profile, from February 2019, identifies her as Airbnb's head data scientist and credits her with starting an internal program called data university, which taught data science techniques to employees at all levels. Her stated aim, as quoted there, was that people who hold data should not be the keepers of knowledge or power.^[4]

Data 2 the People, teaching and community work

After leaving Airbnb she founded Data 2 the People in New Haven. Hopkins describes it as a data science consulting firm focused on real-world impact, and Yale's Earth Week listing billed her as a lecturer and founder of the firm in April 2023.^[5][6]

At Yale she teaches Real World Environmental Data Science, a course she designed, according to the Hopkins profile. Her personal website sets out local priorities in education, public safety, climate action and communication between residents and city government.^[2][5]

Elena's on Orange

Grewal opened Elena's on Orange, an ice cream shop in East Rock, New Haven, after seeing an empty storefront near a park. According to Hopkins she used a community survey to gather flavor ideas and still runs a weekly test-kitchen flavor, with customer feedback deciding whether it joins the regular menu.^[5]

On the High Signal podcast she linked the shop to her data work. The episode summary says limited resources forced better staffing and prep processes, lessons she applies to large enterprises, and that her advice for data leaders includes starting with simple heuristics, building trust by embedding data teams with decision-makers, running scrappy experiments and curating democratized data with guardrails.^[1]

Why she matters

Grewal's path is unusual in her field: an education researcher who built and led one of the better-known corporate data science teams, then moved the same experimental habits into teaching, a local business and neighborhood governance. Her public lessons, from starting small to treating trust as the thing that lets analysis change decisions, are aimed at data leaders who are scaling from zero.^[1][4][5]

On The Executive List

Elena Grewal is ranked No. 76 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Data Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.