Data Science Team seeking new projects after losing funding
The Communications & Cyber Technologies Data Science team received some unfortunate news that we are losing our institutional funding at the end of April. We learned about this change at the end of March, which is due to institutional-wide financial difficulties.
For context, our group has been funded partially through self-generated funds, which come from internal or external grants that our collaborators (and sometimes also us) have applied for and received. These self-generated funds are generally tied to specific projects with deliverables that we complete, such as a project to harmonize data about carbon in Arizona and to automate estimating volatility of chemical compounds.
The remainder of our funds came from the division level, which funds our support of the ALVSCE division at UA through workshops, drop-in hours, and incubator projects. It additionally funds our time to connect with new collaborators, co-develop project ideas, do group and project management, contribute to community efforts at the local and national level, and write or contribute to grants. These latter guaranteed funds are what are being suddenly and unexpectedly pulled from the data science team.
Our group has provided an incredible return on the investment of these division-level funds. We directly bring in research dollars to the university, and additionally increase the competitiveness of our collaborators’ grants by having named and in-house software developers. We enable research to be efficiently and cost-effectively completed that would otherwise require hiring and training grad students or postdocs, as it is challenging to find folks with the necessary background to complete the work. We consistently receive positive feedback on our workshops, which provide training to researchers at all career stages in necessary technical skills that are mostly not being taught in coursework. We have collaborated with numerous researchers that provide consistently positive testimonials that our group has saved money, time, or enabled research that would not have happened without us.
We have been reaching out to collaborators and unit leaders at UA to see if we can quickly fill these funding gaps and retain the positions of all the data science team members. Many folks have been very helpful, with both positive comments and with some sources of funding. Given the federal government defunding both federal grants and positions at federal agencies that we have relied upon to fund some of our projects, this is a uniquely difficult time to have lost this institutional funding.
As being 100% soft-funded is not a sustainable model for the data science team, we are seeking new projects and collaborations. We require institutional support to initiate collaborations with researchers, apply for grant funding, and do necessary ongoing professional development. We are always seeking new projects to work on with UA researchers, and especially so now. We can build automated data analysis pipelines, dashboards to visualize data, and software packages, with skilled expertise in R, Shiny, Python, SQL, git/GitHub, Docker, and geospatial data. See our skills on our individual pages. Please reach out to us if you would like to work with us in any capacity.