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The UBC Master of Data Science programs partner computer science and statistics experts, providing the foundation for a comprehensive approach, as these two disciplines are at the very core of the emerging field of Data Science. Through active and flexible learning techniques, students will be given the opportunity to put theory into practice and to work with real-world data.

Students learn from faculty working at the forefront of their fields. Internationally respected, these leading researchers collaborate with industries, governments and organizations to develop innovative solutions and make a tangible difference to our world. These thought leaders are passionate about their work, committed to student education and eager to share their knowledge.

Meet Some of Our Faculty and Staff

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Giuseppe Carenini

Giuseppe Carenini, Director, MDS Programs

"One of the most unique aspects of this program is that it is designed for students whose main expertise is not in CS and Stats, but rather in other fields like life sciences, healthcare, business, and journalism; after graduation our students will be ready to effectively work as data scientist in those domains."

Joining the University of British Columbia’s Computer Science Faculty in 2004, Giuseppe Carenini has been teaching artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing, for over 15 years.   In his research, Giuseppe has focused on text summarization, information visualization, and decision support, publishing over 120 peer-reviewed publications and receiving two best-paper awards – one from the UMAP 2014 conference (premier user modeling conference ) and the other from the ACM-TiiS-14 journal (top journal on Intelligent Interfaces). Giuseppe's research has been applied by companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, Huawei and Yahoo to develop summarization techniques for product reviews and for conversational data (e.g., emails and blog), as well as basic techniques for discourse parsing and topic modelling.  Giuseppe has also collaborated with local companies that aim to make data more useful in supporting complex decisions (Compass) and for public engagement (Metroquest). Currently, he is serving as the ConVISation Labs Chief Scientific Officer, with the goal of  transferring his research on text analytics to the healthcare domain, in collaboration with the WelTel company

John Braun

W. John Braun, Acting Co-Director and Professor, MDS Okanagan

"Over the years, I have found no truer statement than that of John Tukey which I paraphrase here: 'The best thing about being a data scientist is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.'"

W. John Braun got his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Western  Ontario in 1992. Since then, he has held positions at a number of  universities, including Western for 14 years where he attained the rank  of Full Professor and was Chair of the Statistics Graduate Program for 5  years.  In 2014, he took the opportunity to become Head of Computer  Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics at UBC's Okanagan campus.  

He was Deputy Director of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute and is now Director of the UBCO site for the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery. Braun's research in statistics is motivated by scientific  problems, coming from psychology, biology, medicine, engineering and  physics. His methodological contributions are concerned with  computational issues around uncertainty quantification and smoothing  techniques. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and two books in the area of computational statistics.

Khalad Hasan

Khalad Hasan, Co-Director and Assistant Professor, MDS Okanagan

"The MDS program is an exciting journey for the students as it provides them the opportunity to build a strong understanding of data science subject matters and use this knowledge out in the wild."

Khalad Hasan is an assistant professor of computer science at UBC’s Okanagan campus. His research interest is in human-computer interaction, with a focus on developing and studying novel interactions with mobile and wearable devices. More specifically, he is interested in exploring users’ needs and making an impact in their lives, specifically when it concerns interacting with large data on small devices. Before joining UBC Okanagan, Khalad worked as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo.

Master of Data Science Vancouver Varada

Varada Kolhatkar, Co-Director and Assistant Professor of Teaching, MDS Vancouver

"With a large amount of data available in different disciplines and powerful technology at our fingertips, it is tempting to throw data and technology at problems without deeper understanding of them. This way we easily end up with misleading interpretations of the data. This program teaches you how to interpret your data responsibly and answer data-related questions in a principled way, without ignoring the limitations of the technology or the data."

Varada Kolhatkar was born and raised in Pune, India, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Computer Science. After working in industry for two years in India, she pursued her Master’s degree from the University of Minnesota Duluth and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, both in Computer Science, specializing in Computational Linguistics. Before moving to UBC, Varada spent two years at Simon Fraser University as a post-doctoral fellow, where she developed datasets and computational tools that will help keep online communities engaged in constructive discussions. Varada has diverse experience of working in industry as well as in academia with different universities, countries, and cultures. She joined MDS in October 2018 as a teaching and research postdoctoral fellow. For Varada, learning and sharing knowledge are deeply satisfying practices, expressions of who we are and what we can achieve as human beings and her goal as a teacher is to instill this satisfaction in learning and sharing knowledge by encouraging learners to challenge, to discover, to try out new things, and to think about something in a way they had never thought before.

Garrett Nicolai Master of Data Science Computational Linguistics

Garrett Nicolai, Director and Assistant Professor of Teaching, MDS Computational Linguistics

"It's a really exciting time to be working in NLP.  The field has been revolutionized multiple times in the past decade, and we are seeing great progress solving problems that were unfathomable in the past.  I'm thrilled to be working with the MDS-CL as we prepare students to process, analyse, and model data that is increasing at an unprecedented rate."

Garrett Nicolai joined the MDS Computational Linguistics program in 2020 as a post-doctoral researcher and Capstone mentor, before becoming an Assistant Professor of Teaching. Garrett completed his MSc. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Regina before obtaining a PhD in NLP at the University of Alberta, completing a BA in Linguistics along the way. Before coming to Vancouver, Garrett was a post-doctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Language and Speech Processing, working on low-resource computational morphology. His research interests lie in improving the quality of computational tools for under-resourced languages, including the construction of computational corpora for such purposes.

Tiffany Timbers

Tiffany Timbers, Co-Director and Associate Professor of Teaching, MDS Vancouver

"We teach cutting-edge tools and techniques that are used by data scientists out in the wild."

Tiffany Timbers received her Bachelor of Science in Biology from Carleton University in 2001, following which she completed a doctorate in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia in 2012, which focused on the genetic basis of learning and memory. After obtaining her doctorate, Tiffany carried out data-intensive postdoctoral research in behavioural and neural genomics at Simon Fraser University (published in PLoS Genetics). During this time, she also gained valuable experience teaching computational skills to students and scientists through her work with Data and Software Carpentry, the SFU scientific programming study group, and teaching a course in computation in Physical Sciences at Quest University. Tiffany began her teaching role in the MDS program at UBC in the summer of 2016.

Learn more about Tiffany.

Ifeoma Adaji Master of Data Science Okanagan

Ifeoma Adaji, Assistant Professor, MDS Okanagan

"The MDS program is designed to give students the relevant ‘hands on’ skills they need to succeed  as data scientists. The strengths of the program include the diversity of the instructors and the evolving curriculum to meet current industry needs and standards." 

Ifeoma Adaji is an assistant professor of computer science at UBC's Okanagan campus. She completed her Master's degree from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, UK and her Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. She briefly worked in industry as a data scientist after her Ph.D. in lieu of a postdoc.  Her research interests include the development of tailored persuasive technologies for social good and the use of user generated data online to understand and predict the behaviour of online users. She is also interested in Fairness, Accountability, Transparency & Ethics in AI (FATE).

Master of Data Science Vancouver Prajeet Bajpai

Prajeet Bajpai, Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow, MDS Vancouver

“We are collecting more data than ever before. Tools from data science and machine learning are also growing more accessible, making it easier to mine this data for our benefit, but also making it easier to draw false conlcusions and make costly mistakes based on bad science. UBC’s MDS Program is designed to give students a solid foundation in the fundamentals of data science, enabling them to generate reliable and reproducible insights from data and to understand the ethical implications of their work.”

Prajeet received his Master's and PhD in Mathematics at the University of British Columbia and his Bachelor's degree at Dartmouth College. As a PhD student, he had the opportunity to work as a TA for MDS, and joined the program full-time as a Postdoctoral Teaching and Learning Fellow in 2024.

Master of Data Science Vancouver Katie Burak Headshot

Katie Burak, Assistant Professor of Teaching, MDS Vancouver

“The MDS program provides students the tools they need to tackle real-world problems in a variety of industries. Focusing on both theoretical and applied aspects of data science, the faculty at MDS strive to prepare students to be successful outside of the classroom.”

Katie completed her PhD in Statistics at the University of Alberta where her academic work focused on increasing the computational efficiency of nonparametric approaches such as bootstrapping using concentration of measure. Prior to that, she completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Mathematics and Statistics, respectively. Katie has a passion for statistical outreach and education and has organized a variety of outreach events in her community. Additionally, she is interested in investigating modern pedagogical methods and best teaching practices in the field of data science.

Daniel Chen

Daniel Chen, Lecturer, MDS Vancouver

"The MDS faculty puts a tremendous amount of effort on the education and pedagogy of learning real-world data science skills. The courses are constantly adapting to new tools and gives the opportunity to practice the skills used in the workplace. During the capstone project, each learner consolidates all the skills into a specific domain in a collaborative team environment."

Daniel received their Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience from Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College and their Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.  Their PhD work was on data science education in the biomedical sciences from Virginia Tech where they looked at the process of creating and assessing the effectiveness of domain-specific data science materials with learner personas. They have also been involved with The Carpentries since 2014 where has has been an instructor, instructor trainer, and community maintainer lead. Daniel is a Data Science Educator at RStudio, PBC and joined the MDS faculty in March of 2022.

Learn more about Daniel