Cyber security findings, company sales, shopping trends and the impact of social media are driven by big data. By 2021, according to a 2017 Business-Higher Education Forum report, “Investing in America’s Data Science and Analytics Talent: The Case for Action,” college graduates with a skill set that incorporates data science and analytics, will be two times more likely to be hired than their peers. With less than one in four graduates possessing these skills, Brandeis Marshall, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the Spelman College Department of Computer and Information Sciences, is preparing Spelman students for this major shift in the job market.
With the support of a three-year National Science Foundation grant, Dr. Marshall and a colleague at Morehouse College, are training faculty at Spelman and Morehouse on data science principles that apply to a number of interdisciplinary areas such as applied statistics, biology, business analytics, business intelligence, chemistry, computer science, data analytics, data mining and information management.
Data science and analytics-enabled jobs are varied and include business analysts, financial fund managers, cyber security analysts, statistical geneticists and marketing directors.
“I believe that data runs our world,” said Dr. Marshall in Diverse Issues in Higher Education. “I cannot think of one discipline or field that does not collect, store, categorize, manipulate and process data for information management.”
Dr. Marshall teaches several courses including “Data Structures and Theoretical Foundation of Computer Science” and “Introduction to Database Management Systems.“ She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Rochester and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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