Professional Bio

James "Jay" Yonamine is co-founder and chief product and technology officer of Whimsey Labs. Previously, as head of technology and data science for the Legal Organization at Google, he led the patent data science team and a group of patent engineers, transforming how Google approaches patent quality across its sixty-thousand-plus patent portfolio. His work included developing AI-powered tools to assess patent breadth and similarity, creating dashboards to track and enhance patent quality, and spearheading a large-scale cleanup of Google's intellectual property data, correcting more than 200,000 records. Yonamine earned an M.A. (2011) and Ph.D. (2013) in political science from Penn State. He has established an undergraduate scholarship in the College of the Liberal Arts, mentors students through the Liberal Arts Alumni Mentor Program, and serves on the California Advisory Board for TechBridge Girls.