Professor Suzan van der Lee spearheads Metropolitan Chicago Data-science Corps (MCDC) to help meet the data science needs of the Chicago metropolitan area

Spearheaded by Professor Suzan van der Lee of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, the Metropolitan Chicago Data-science Corps (MCDC) has been established as an interdisciplinary corps. MCDC will assist a wide range of community-based groups in taking advantage of increasing data volume and complexity while offering data science students opportunities to apply their skills.

MCDC is comprised of five Illinois universities, led by Northwestern University, and will help meet the data science needs of the Chicago metropolitan area. The corps will be supported by a new grant from the National Science Foundation of nearly $1.5 million over three years.

Professor Suzan van der Lee

“The amount of data produced in society today can be overwhelming to nonprofit organizations, especially those without pertinent resources, but data can help them fulfill their missions,” explained Van der Lee.

Van der Lee is one of the co-directors on the MCDC team. Additional co-directors from Northwestern include Michelle Birkett, Bennett Goldberg, and Diane Schanzenbach.  The MCDC team includes Northwestern faculty in the new data science minor and major programs offered by Weinberg College and the McCormick School of Engineering. Faculty from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine are also involved.

Other partner universities include DePaul University, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, and the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Above: The MCDC has three areas of strength: health sciences, social sciences, and environmental sciences. All three are supported by fundamental science and connected via data science through shared analytical and scalable methodologies, cross-fertilization, innovation, and a focus on equity. (Source: https://sites.northwestern.edu/mcdc/)

MCDC is particularly interested in data challenges that focus on the environment, health, and social well-being. Requests for data services are now being accepted from nonprofit and governmental organizations in metropolitan Chicago.

Some community partners that MCDC will assist include the City of Chicago, the Greater Chicago Food Depository, Howard Brown Health, and The Nature Conservancy.

“With this new data science corps, we are sharing our expertise to help community organizations use data to their advantage,” Van der Lee said. “And interdisciplinary teams of Chicagoland data science students will receive hands-on training on how to partner with the community organizations with the goal of completing projects with real-world impact.”

Van der Lee is also a member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), which will provide administrative infrastructure to the MCDC.

“Despite a global pandemic, we have seen our region’s technology industry flourish — an achievement that is undoubtedly thanks to dynamic partnerships forged between our incredible city and state universities,” Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot said. “The MCDC is the latest of such partnerships, and it will deepen our regional strength in data science while simultaneously enhancing how nonprofit organizations and government bodies utilize data-driven programs to strengthen our communities.”

MCDC will work to integrate the needs of community organizations with academic learning. Undergraduate students at the partner universities will work on data science projects provided by the organizations as part of the curriculum.

At Northwestern, undergraduate students can be in any discipline and will have at least a year of data sciences courses, and  students in the master’s program can volunteer to be project managers.  Students completing the course then will be eligible for paid summer internships in which they can work more in-depth on projects with students from partner universities.

Above: The MCDC operates on a Data Refinery model of the four main phases of data science. It begins with the process of planning, generating, and collecting data, and ends with the delivery of insights and knowledge extracted from the data “refining” process.

In the third year of the grant, the MCDC plans to work with faculty at a city college and a community college to implement its curriculum there, further expanding data science education in metropolitan Chicago.

To learn more about MCDC visit their website here.