The University of California, Berkeley has announced a five-year, $12.6 million commitment from alumni Eric (’82) and Wendy (’81) Schmidt in support of a new research center focused on applying data science to solving environmental challenges.

Developed through a partnership between UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at Rausser College of Natural Resources, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment will work to enhance ongoing research and educational collaboration. The center will include an intentional combination of computing and environmental science with open science principles, and it will make its solutions publicly available to all as well as make sure they are practical and can be replicated and scaled. The center’s potential focus areas include big data collection and synthesis, predicting and forecasting environmental outcomes, and environmental management and decision support tools.

“From carbon concentrations in the highest reaches of our atmosphere to microplastics in the deepest ocean, our natural environment is being impacted everywhere we look, but environmental solutions remain rare, or out of reach where they’re needed most,” said Wendy Schmidt, president and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation and co-founder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute and Schmidt Futures. “The Schmidt Center will help all of us, and particularly communities around the world on the front lines of environmental impacts, work together to harness the power of data to encourage innovation and drive action.”

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