Dr. Joseph Robertson – Featured Speaker

Dr. Joseph Robertson is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation and is the Founder and Chief Data Scientist of Mato Ohitika Analytics LLC.

Mato Ohitika Analytics LLC provides tribal communities with statistical consulting, data science solutions and machine learning & artificial intelligence research and development. The company’s primary focus is on the role of data driven decision making in tribal governance using the Data Sovereignty Initiative (DSI).

The DSI is a native-centric horizontal governance framework designed to create SMART solutions to solve significant challenges facing Native nations by bridging science and culture through Indigenous Data Sovereignty. Dr. Robertson focused his doctoral work on developing an ethical, cultural, and Native community-based approach to tribal nation building that incorporates data science to support decision making in education, health care, economic development, resource management, and other areas of tribal governance.

Dr. Robertson holds a Ph.D in Computational Science and Statistics and a Master of Science in Statistics from South Dakota State University, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Colorado State University. Joseph is an educator and has spent a number of years working in the Indian education system teaching mathematics and statistics.