The DALI Lab was excited to welcome our first Data Science and Visualization Fellow, Osman Khan ‘21, to the team. During his undergraduate years, Osman was a very active member of the Dartmouth Outing Club and the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, in addition to his studies. He majored in Mathematical Data Science and Government.
“Having majored in data science [I know] that the classroom can only do so much to make you feel competent with something as practical as data science; it takes more hands-on experience to feel really fluent in it,” Khan said.
Osman comes to the lab as data science and data visualization continue to become more and more important and increasingly overlap with fields like UX design and software development.
This Fellowship is funded by the Infusing Data Science into Undergraduate STEM Education (DIFUSE) project, a $2.4m NSF Accelerating Discovery Award granted to Petra Taylor (Thayer, PI), Lorie Loeb (Co-PI), Laura Ray (Thayer, Co-PI), and Scott Pauls (Math, Co-PI). In light of the ever-emerging prevalence of data science, the goals of the award are to offer students data science education without having to major in data science. Khan’s role is to further this mission at DALI.
Khan will develop a new data visualization-specific track to empower teams to create powerful, interactive visualizations of data sets brought to us by partners around the world. He will develop new hands-on trainings, mini-series, workshops, and student data science positions within the lab. Students receive Khan’s expert advice as they get real experience working with complex data. Khan will provide the much-needed support and expertise in an area DALI has been passionate about since its inception, but lacked resources to support. Combining this new programming with DALI’s existing expertise in UI, interactivity, and software development gives DALI students the chance to become high-caliber data wizards. Keep an eye out for more information and data-related opportunities at DALI, this year is going to be packed!
