Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today announced that Jeannette Wing, currently corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, will become the Avanessians Director of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science.
Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:
I write to announce my appointment of Dr. Jeannette Wing as the Avanessians Director of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science. Jeannette will report to the president and will lead the University’s research, scholarship, and teaching in data science, an initiative already involving more than 200 affiliated faculty members across Columbia’s campuses. This effort will continue expanding in coming years in service of academic discovery in a variety of disciplines including neuroscience and precision medicine, the humanities and social sciences, public policy, and journalism. The objectives of this project, core to the University’s sustained excellence, are clear and ambitious, and Jeannette is ideally suited to help us achieve them. She will begin in her new role in early July.
“Jeannette comes to Columbia from Microsoft, where for the past four years she has been Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, overseeing a global network of research labs. She is widely recognized for her intellectual leadership, having earned the respect and admiration of colleagues across the field for her role in the dramatic transformation of data science into a discipline essential to so much scholarly discovery and productive invention. Jeannette’s seminal essay, titled “Computational Thinking,” was published more than a decade ago and is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced.” [Rest of Story]