Scholarship on Display
Scholarship On Display is a rotating exhibit series showcasing faculty work from academic departments and programs at William & Mary. This installment, located in Swem Library’s lobby, features publications and research from faculty members in the Data Science program.
The Data Science program has 11 faculty members whose research covers a broad range of area strengths: Data and Society, Large Scale Experiments, Patterns of Information Dissemination, Data and Location, and Public Health. The faculty within Data Science are funded by the National Science Foundation, the Departments of Education, Energy, and Homeland Security, as well as various foundations. In the 2022-2023 academic year, the program brought in $2.3 million dollars of external research funding.
Data Science nurtures a research-oriented environment, mentoring students with work on a variety of applications, including social media analysis, biology, physics, and environmental applications through the work of various research labs. Data Science students work within several faculty-led research labs across disciplines, including the Social Networks and Political Psychology (SNaPP) Lab, the Computational & Experimental Linguistics Lab (CELL), Saha Lab, Geospatial Evaluation & Observation Lab (geoLab), Applied Conservation & Ecological Research (ACER), Computational Biology Laboratory (CBL), Initiative for Computational Society and Security Research, and Zeta Lab.
Data Science advances computing and liberal arts and science education. The undergraduate program offers a major and minor and will graduate 51 majors this year. William & Mary was the first Data Science BS degree in the state of Virginia and offers three tracks: Data Application, Algorithms, and Spatial Data Analysis—and starting in the 2024-2025 academic year, a track in Artificial Intelligence. The graduate program offers a graduate certificate in Data and Computer Science, and a PhD in Applied Science with a Specialization in Data Science. Looking towards the future, Data Science will further its strong collaborations with Computer Science, Applied Science, and Physics with the opening of the new School of Computing, Data Sciences, and Physics.
Discover Data Science faculty research on W&M Scholarworks, William & Mary Libraries’ suite of services which promotes W&M scholarship on all search engines in the spirit of open access so that the campus community can gain more visibility for its scholarly work. Scholarship produced by the W&M community in open access spaces such as ScholarWorks receives nearly twice as many citations as publications behind paywalls do.
Library liaison to the Data Science Program: Mary Oberlies, Instruction & Research Librarian
Exhibit preparation: Natalie Rue, Metadata Specialist; Jamie Lukow '24, M.A. Student in History and Special Collections Graduate Apprentice; and Jennie Davy, Exhibits and Artifacts Curator
Exhibit design: Shradha Dinesh '24, SCRC Graphics Student Assistant
Exhibit installation: Jennie Davy; Faith Page '26, Special Collections Student Assistant; and Veronica Parker, Collections Specialist