Carlos F. Gaitan Ospina

Dr. Carlos Gaitan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Benchmark Labs. This Techstars-backed company provides IoT-based weather forecasting solutions for the agriculture, energy, and insurance sectors worldwide using proprietary machine-learning software.

Growing up in Colombia, Dr. Gaitan became fascinated with studying the impact hydrology, and climate change have on specialty crops. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia, working with William Hsieh in machine learning applications in the environmental sciences. He also holds a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and a Master's degree in Hydrosystems from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia).

Before founding Benchmark Labs, he worked at early-stage start-ups in the environmental science space, including VP of Weather Forecasting and Head of Data Science at Arable Labs, and as Research Scientist for the South Central Climate Science Center at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey.

Currently, he is an elected member of the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Artificial Intelligence Committee.