Women in Data Science Worldwide

Data science and genetics are closely linked and have been for some time. But now, data science is playing an even larger role in genetics, a trend that is prompting researchers to look hard at their ethical responsibilities, says Chiara Sabatti, a professor of biomedical data science and statistics at Stanford University. As is the case in many other fields, geneticists have access to much more d...

Career paths don’t always follow a straight line. Just ask Elena Grewal, whose education culminated in a PhD in education, but who became the head data scientist at Airbnb. In some ways, the leap wasn’t quite as daunting as it might sound. Grewal’s training at Stanford was interdisciplinary, including statistics and econometrics. “Often it’s more about words being different than about skills being...

Consumers know Walmart as a retailing giant that has changed the face of retail in communities across America. But with a data store containing billions of queries and items, it’s also a laboratory for the company’s data scientists and IT professionals who mine and manage it. “We have data scientists embedded in every single team within the company,” says Sonu Durgia, group product manager for sea...

Data scientists are involved in a wide array of domains, everything from healthcare to cybersecurity to cosmology. Megan Price and her colleagues at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), however, are using data science to help bring human rights abusers to justice. The nonpartisan group played a key role in the case of Edgar Fernando García, a 26-year-old engineering student and labor acti...

Fiber optic cables that convey data at high speeds across the globe area is a well-known feature of modern technology. Now, university data scientists have found a unique use for them: monitoring earthquakes. Distributed across Stanford’s telecom infrastructure, the cables have become a seismic array that has already collected data on over 1,000 Bay Area earthquakes, says Eileen Martin, a recent a...

“Fail fast” has become something of a mantra in Silicon Valley. But Janet George, the chief data officer of data storage giant Western Digital, has an amendment to that conventional wisdom: “Fail privately.”She suggests that failing privately allows you to open yourself up to discovery and exploration in a safe setting where you are able to take risks. “Carve out time for yourself so you can fail...

When Jennifer Widom began her career in computer science, it was a relatively narrow and specialized field. Three decades later, computer science has become an interdisciplinary field that touches on broad swaths of society and promises solutions to global problems such as healthcare and sustainability, she says. “Computer science used to be a niche. But (it) has become much more broadly used, bro...

Be yourself” was just one of the many career tips Caitlin Smallwood shared during a conversation with Stanford professor and Women in Data Science podcast host, Margot Gerritsen. Smallwood, vice president of data science and analytics at Netflix, urges up-and-coming data scientists to explore “the avenues and nooks and crannies” of the discipline and avoid limiting themselves to the most obvious p...

Attaining tenured status at a major university is often the culmination of an academic’s career; giving it up is unthinkable for most. But after 10 years at UCLA, Jennifer Chayes was offered a job at Microsoft. The offer, she says,“scared me to death,” but she took the job and is now managing director for Microsoft Research in New England, New York and Montreal. “There are brass rings that come al...