Study Data Science
Data Science is the fastest growing major at UW-Madison, and students across campus are interested in increasing their data literacy. Whether you are interested in a data science career or course, opportunities abound at UW-Madison. Learn more about majors, courses, and professional degrees and certificates
Explore Campus Resources
Data science has applications in all disciplines, and data science @ uw is your connection to data science institutes, centers, and programs across the UW-Madison campus. It’s also the place to find research funding, training, coding meetups, news, events and seminars, student orgs, communities of practice, and other resources.
Collaborate With Us
Data science innovation at UW-Madison furthers the Wisconsin Idea by fueling discovery and economic development. Our research and talent development benefit communities and businesses in all corners of the state, and beyond. We are committed to fostering an inclusive culture in data science. Learn about collaboration opportunities
Faces of Data Science
“Mental health is, I think, as complicated as you get, in terms of the data. Wherever there’s data, and complicated data, you need data science to help understand the patterns that you’re seeing. From there, you hopefully can improve treatment options.”
Amy Cochran
Assistant Professor, Departments of Mathematics and Population Health Sciences
Amy Cochran works in computational psychiatry, creating mathematical models to increase understanding of psychiatric phenomena that are traditionally subjective and hard to define, such as emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. The mental health field generates an enormous amount of data. Amy uses causal inference, which is the process of using data to infer causes and solve problems, to help researchers make sense of this data and clinicians understand what interventions will best support their patients.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people struggling with their mental health has grown faster than the capacity to support them. Amy is developing mobile apps that deliver personalized micro-interventions, and data science helps her understand how to provide the correct interventions in ways that respect what’s going on in patients’ lives. She describes these apps as a band-aid to support some individuals who may be on a waiting list or face other barriers to accessing mental health care.
Amy relies on strong collaborative relationships with clinicians who keep her work focused on improving patients’ well-being. She also collaborates with her husband, Gabriel Zayas-Caban, who is a professor of industrial and systems engineering. Amy, Gabriel, and Brian Patterson were recently awarded an American Family Funding Initiative grant for operations research in hospitals, insurance, and other systems.
Data science is an emerging field that is roughly defined as the study, development, and application of methods that reveal new insights from data, which include numbers, text, images, graphs, sounds, code, and metadata. This website is an inclusive portal to resources and activities related to data science at UW-Madison.
As data reshapes our world, UW–Madison brings the power of data science to every field of study. The future path of data science will be shaped by insights from all disciplines.