With a new generation of ground and space-based surveys generating petabytes of data per year, together with the increasing complexity of data coming from these instruments, astrophysics is becoming ever more dependent on developments in computing. There is, however, a disconnect between the skills that are needed for an era rich in data and those that we teach to incoming graduate students and early-career postdocs. The Data Science Fellowship Program was created to bridge this gap and provide a supplemental educational program to prepare early-career scientists for data-rich astronomy.
The LSSTC Data Science Fellowship program is designed to teach skills required for LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) science that are not easily addressed by current astrophysics programs. It consists of three, one-week schools per year over a two-year period. For their initial week of training, the inaugural cohort of graduate students were hosted by CIERA at Northwestern August 1-5, with a trip to Adler Planetarium on the final afternoon of the week. There were 16 students from around the globe, plus 4 Northwestern students who are auditing the week of training.
Program Leadership:
Lucianne Walkowicz (The Adler Planetarium) – Director
Vicky Kalogera (CIERA/Northwestern) – Deputy Director
Adam Miller (JPL, CIERA/The Adler Planetarium) – Director of Program Development and Communications
Chris Lintott (Oxford); Andrew Connoly (UW); Zeljko Ivezic (UW); Phil Marshall (SLAC/Stanford); Mario Juric (LSST); Robert Lupton (Princeton) – Leadership Council
The LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program is made possible by the generous support of the LSST Corporation, the Data Science Initiative (DSI) at Northwestern, and CIERA.
