Data Science & Statistics Program

Data Science & Statistics Program

The minor in data science & statistics prepares students to address the challenges of collecting, understanding, and presenting structured and unstructured data from a variety of different domains and contexts. Minor RequirementsCourses
Talk About "How to Read Books with AI: AI and Narrative Analysis"

Join us as Rebecca M. M. Hicke, PhD candidate at Cornell, presents a talk, How to Read Books with AI: AI and Narrative Analysis. Rebecca’s research interests lie in computational humanities, natural language processing, and cultural analytics. Specifically, I explore how large language models (LLMs) can be use for complex textual, particularly literary, analysis tasks.

March 24 @ 4:30 pm in Jepson Hall 118

Data Visualization Grant-Funding

Statistics professor Taylor Arnold and digital humanities professor Lauren Tilton recently received grant funding for two data science projects. They received a $485,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for their Distant Viewing Toolkit project, an open-source technology for the computational analysis of visual culture. Arnold and Tilton have also received a nearly $325K grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a project to build open-source software for collecting and analyzing digital images.

Mellon Grant Information
NEH Grant Information

Faculty Highlights

Spera, Oza, and Lookingbill study local flooding

Over the next three years, Stephanie Spera, associate professor of geography, environment, and sustainability, Hemali Oza, assistant professor of health studies, and Todd Lookingbill, professor of geography, environment, and sustainability and biology, will work closely with the local environmental justice nonprofit Southside ReLeaf on a community-led study of flooding on the Southside of Richmond with the support of a grant from the Jeffress Trust.

Stephanie Spera
Hemali Oza
Todd Lookingbill
Yang receives NSF CAREER award, nearly $1 million for genomics research

Melinda A. Yang, associate professor of biology, received a National Science Foundation CAREER award of more than $990,000 to support her research on genetic adaptations in modern humans. Over the next five years, Yang, an ancient DNA expert, will build an easy-to-use tool that combines present-day and ancient DNA data to help researchers identify the genetic changes that have helped humans adapt and survive over time. Yang will also develop a Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) using ancient DNA datasets for students taking her Human Evolutionary Genomics course at UR.

 

Melinda Yang
Yang, Spera, Zizzamia, & students publish online visualizer for ancient human DNA

Melinda A. Yang, assistant professor of biology, Stephanie A. Spera, associate professor of geography, environment, & sustainability, and Beth Zizzamia, spatial analysis lab GIS operations manager, along with students Flora Yi, '27, and Elliot Delroba, '24, published "The AADR Visualizer: an ArcGIS online visualizer for ancient human DNA from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource" in the Bioinformatic Advances. The AADR Visualizer is the associated tool. The groundbreaking project lets users explore ancient human DNA through an interactive global map.

Melinda Yang
Stephanie Spera
Beth Zizzamia
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