What Is Data Science? by Dr. Brandi Patrice Smith

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Dr. Brandi Patrice Smith received her PhD at the University of Illinois in Informatics. She is trained as an interdisciplinary data scientist with skills in a number of technologies including bioinformatics/Next Generation Sequencing, epidemiological statistics, and machine learning. She has published in several academic journals and has received awards from the American Association of Cancer Research and the Endocrine Society for her research on breast cancer disparities. 


Dr. Smith has a love for education, financial literacy, and all things math - mostly statistics. Her life’s goal is to be able to leverage her love for education with her love for mathematics. She is the founder and CEO of the Data Science Academy which is an educational platform where she teaches high school students, in disadvantaged geographic areas, introductory statistical concepts, and coding.

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Data science seems to encompass all things tech. No, no, no all things data. Na, all things computer programming. Don’t forget business analytics. The truth is data science is a little bit of each topic mentioned above, and more. As a matter of fact, if you took the “STEM” route in college, you can smoothly transition to a data science career. Data scientists leverage mathematical algorithms, model them to data, and make sense of the data in a meaningful - sometimes profitable - way. The data can be from a range of resources including medical or hospital record data, behavioral data from surveys, business insights, and social media. The truth is data science has been around for a while but is now becoming more mainstream.

Since I learned of the field of data science in 2017, I realized I’d been preparing for a career in data science most of my life. I hold a couple of degrees in mathematics - which prepared me for the problem solving, algorithm developing, and methods building side of it; and I recently completed my PhD in Informatics - which prepared me for all the “new” and “up and coming” methods like natural language processing, machine learning, and BIG data or the cloud.

Data science and related tech has also added to the ever-widening wage gaps present between men and women and between white and marginalized groups. Not everyone has access to the new opportunities in the field of data science, especially regarding training and access to technological resources. In a recent interview, Nicole Turner Lee, author of The Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass, describes how rural Americans and those without the advantages of the internet aren’t benefiting from the 4th industrial revolution. Lee attributes the internet access issue to infrastructure problems, especially in rural areas where some do not benefit from broadband internet. Lee also describes that people of color, older and often less “internet” interested populations, as well as rural Americans are becoming the new social underclass and that this issue is heightened by data science methods such as machine learning and AI.

The true issue is that society needs to take time to address the “digital” gap by educating these populations so that they can stay abreast with the changing digital economy. While Udemy and Coursera offer data science courses and certificates, these are sometimes unaffordable and require some higher education background. However, for example, The Last Mile, a California-based program, educates inmates on how to code and prepares them for jobs in tech when they are released from prison. Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization, has a mission to close the gender gap between computer programmers and coders by offering free coding classes to middle and high school girls. With organizations such as the Last Mile and Girls Who Code, we begin to broaden the reach of those who become educated in the field of data science. This ensures that no one is left behind during this transformative period in history.

Learn more about Dr. Smith at Twitter: www.twitter.com/brandipsmith92

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/datascience.academy/

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