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Data Science Program

Columbian College of Arts & Sciences

2024 Data Science Newsletter

Message from the Program Director
Program Spotlights
Alumni Class Notes

Message from the Program Director

Ryan Engstrom

Greetings to all of our alumni from the George Washington University Data Science Program! I am pleased to report that our program continues to grow in faculty and students and improve at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. This year, we hired both a new associate director and a new career coach to support our program. On the faculty side, we hired a new full-time faculty member, Dr. Hazim Shatnawi, who focuses on databases, and a visiting professor, Dr. Sushovan Majhi, who focuses on algorithms. 

In this newsletter, you’ll read about a few of the exciting things happening in the program, including about recent student projects.

Thank you so much for your support and involvement. Please stay in touch.

Ryan Engstrom
Director, Data Science Program

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Program Spotlights 

data_science_students
Data Science students on the DSSD Ukraine map include (clockwise from left) Abhishek Chiffon, Anjali Mudgal, Cricket Baldwin, Vivian Wang and Shikha Kumari.
 
 

Data Science Students Map a Mission for Ukraine

As winter sets in, Ukrainians face harsh temperatures in war-torn homes. But graduates and undergraduates in the student-run GW Data Science for Sustainable Development Hub are using their data science skills to map out a rescue plan. The students are honing their professional skills while showing how data science makes a difference. They were featured in GW Today. 

Three data science majors at a research fair
Data Science undergraduate students with their capstone posters. From left: Rohith Pydi, Anish Ravuri and Makayla Clauson.
 

Undergraduate Program Passes the 100 Majors Mark

When the undergraduate program officially launched in fall 2021, there were only seven students pursuing the Bachelor of Science degree in data science and eight students minoring in data science. Despite this quiet start, the undergraduate program has since grown to over 100 majors and over 60 minors. We are excited to see how our flourishing undergraduate cohort will choose to apply their skills in their careers!

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Alumni Class Notes

  • Ruoyu Deng, MS ’18, is a lead product analyst at Upwork with five years of experience in designing and building exploratory machine learning and causal inference models.
  • Kristin Levine, MS ’22, is working as a biomedical data scientist at the National Institute of Health, processing genetics data and doing research with biobank data. Every day, she uses skills she learned in her Machine Learning and Cloud Computing classes.
  • Nhung Nguyen, MS ’20, is a data scientist at Indigo Ag, Inc.
  • Sean Pili, MS ’20, has done gradient descent across multiple jobs since graduation and converged at a position he enjoys doing NLP work after 2 years.

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