Danielle shaped iconic launches at Apple and later founded Google’s Empathy Lab.

She is a force who makes the future through a rare weave of science, story, moral imagination and creative vision. Over the past 25 years, she has shaped some of the most iconic launches of our time at Apple under Steve Jobs, later joining Google X to work on its earliest moonshots. She went on to found Google’s Empathy Lab, a bold R&D initiative exploring human resilience, relational AI, and advanced technologies. There, she pioneered machine psychology in design practice and developed the first social-emotional intelligence protocols and interfaces in deep collaboration with scientists, artists, wisdom keepers, and movement builders.

Danielle’s work has long lived at the edges, walking ridgelines between worlds and coming alongside what is just beginning to take form. Her practice now centers on planetary computing, where ecology, intelligence, and technology meet the long work of building beloved community with contemplative depth. She is devoted to shaping sovereign technologies rooted in relationship, presence, and reverence for life, systems guided not only by innovation, but by care, wisdom, and a lived accountability to people and place.

Danielle is a peacemaker, a Zen priest ordaining in the Plum Village lineage, and a Zen chaplain trained by Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya. She advises the University of Hawai‘i’s Office of Indigenous Knowledge & Innovation, and serves on the board of Ram Dass’ Foundation. She has spoken at SXSW, Sundance, Aspen Ideas, TED, Wisdom + AI, and at institutions including NASA, Jet Propulsion Lab, Caltech, MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley. Her work has been featured in Nature, TIME, WIRED, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today. 

She is currently at work on her first book, quietly making new magic with old friends, and lives with her family on an avocado farm on the slopes of a volcano, raising her daughter in close kinship with the land, among aunties, uncles, whale breath, and birdsong.