Kai Pak is Director of Engineering at the Accelerator, based at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). His team builds and operates ACE, a multi-tenant data platform used by social science researchers studying the information ecosystem.”. He presented the platform’s architecture at the 2026 Databricks Data + AI Summit. Previously, he was a senior data scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on large-scale synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data processing and computer vision applications. He holds master’s degrees in applied physics from Columbia University and in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
