UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) welcomed seven new faculty in statistics, electrical engineering and computational precision health to its community this fall.
The college also appointed two new chairs, its first endowed chairs since the UC Board of Regents approved its launch in May 2023. Together, these appointments continued the growth of CDSS as the first new college at Berkeley in more than 50 years.
“Our new faculty are expanding the college’s capacity to meet its ambitious mission to advance the science, shape the technologies, and educate the leaders of tomorrow,” said Jennifer Chayes, dean of the college. “As developments in artificial intelligence rapidly advance, our faculty are on the cutting-edge of their fields, ensuring relevant research helps our students and the public."
CDSS continues to break new ground as it builds the academic and administrative structures to become a lasting campus institution. For example, the college welcomed its first class of directly admitted undergraduate students this fall.
The college’s first two endowed chairs will receive support for their academic initiatives in research and teaching.
Bin Yu is CDSS Chancellor’s Chair with appointments in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS). Jennifer Listgarten, a professor in EECS and the Center for Computational Biology, is the new Jeffrey Huber and Angel Vossough Chancellor’s Chair in Computational Biomedicine. EECS is shared by Berkeley’s College of Engineering and CDSS.
This year’s faculty are the second cohort joining the new college. They include Amanda Coston, Joshua Grossman, Arash Jamshidpey and Evan Munro in the Department of Statistics; Yuan Cao and Pierliugi Nuzzo in EECS; and Sandya Subramanian in the UC San Francisco - UC Berkeley Joint Computational Precision Health Program.
The faculty joining CDSS bring their own expertise, enthusiasm and purpose to the college community. Take Coston, who joined Berkeley as an assistant professor of statistics after working as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research.
Coston said she hopes to “harness the power of data and data-driven methods for the benefit of society.” She studies how to develop, evaluate and improve algorithms for use in high-stakes settings from healthcare to public services. She wants to understand how these spaces work and their challenges to derive relevant and impactful research ideas.
To do this kind of work, Coston partners with academics across disciplines, public agencies and companies. She looks forward to building those kinds of collaborations with Berkeley’s excellent faculty and students in statistics and elsewhere on campus.
“It is so exciting to pursue my agenda at Berkeley and in particular CDSS,” said Coston. “The vision of CDSS – to use computing and data science to solve the greatest societal challenges – is so compelling and aligned with my own vision."