Strengths and Aspirations

Existing Strengths

The University of Utah is a regional leader in education

The University of Utah launched the undergraduate Data Science program in 2019. As of Fall 2022, the program has 76 students and has served as a model for more recently launched programs in the region.

Our faculty are doing innovative data science

• How People Actually Lie With Charts, Alex Lex and Marina Kogan
• Mapper Interactive: A Scalable, Extendable, and Interactive Toolbox for the Visual Exploration of High-Dimensional Data, Youjia Zhou, Nithin Chalapathi, Archit Rathore, Yaodong Zhao, Bei Wang
  • Protein-metabolite interactomics of carbohydrate metabolism reveal regulation of lactate dehydrogenase, Science
  • Metaboverse enables automated discovery and visualization of diverse metabolic regulatory patterns, Nature Cell Bio
• Scientific Machine Learning: using machine learning to automatically from data uncover models of physical systems, Shandian Zhe et al.

We are a leader in population data curation and host unique data sets

See our growing list of these resources!

Utah hosts a fast growing digital technology and data science economy

• Genomic data science for diagnostics and gene discovery, supported by the UCGD and CGM on the Health Sciences campus and in the Department of Biology.
• BioHive
• SiliconSlopes
• The Point

The University of Utah is known for multidisciplinary centers of innovation

• Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
  • History of the SCI Institute and Computing at the University of Utah
• Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute
• Clinical & Translational Science Institute
• Utah Center for Genetic Discovery
• Center for Genomic Medicine

The University of Utah has a rich history of translational impact

We are aimed to accel in the future

• We are fostering a data science community through activities such as Annual Data Science Day, the UCDS Seminar Series, the DATASET Discovery Workshops, the DELPHI Data Science Education Workshops, and many more.
• We are integrated with local technology companies and are supporting an upcoming event with BioHive.

Future Aspirations

Advance infrastructure for innovation

• Data: The actual data has been collected
• Storage and Computing: To do things with the data
• Interfaces: To enable research on the data (largely missing)
• Responsible: Guidance for how to use infrastructure and models responsibly

Be the next national hub for data science and attract global talent

Supply local talent and transfer innovation to local industry

Data science education is pervasive and available to everyone one campus

Lead in development of data science as a new paradigm for science

Create a frictionless data science community

• We are aware of local expertise, ongoing projects, and are initializing
• We are proud to host an environment of cross-collaboration, where research is truly larger than the sum of the parts
  • We are in the process of developing a network of collaborations to showcase this environment

Serve our community based on identified needs

From our initial survey our community of data scientists is looking for collaboration, funding opportunities, education, and connection to students and industry.