The University of Virginia has announced a six-year, $10 million gift from the Quantitative Foundation in Philadelphia to create an endowment for the university's Data Science Institute. UVA will provide $7 million over six years to supplement the endowment.

The gift will support the institute's efforts to establish a curriculum for a master of data science degree program, to be launched in the fall; an undergraduate minor in data science; and, eventually, a Ph.D. program. DSI also will conduct research and offer integrated instruction across a variety of disciplines, including computation, science, law, engineering, mathematics, statistics, commerce, social science, and the humanities. Founded in 2013, the institute has hosted summits to examine challenges in dealing with huge data sets, with a focus on discovering how researchers from different disciplines can work together to solve problems; future sessions will focus on areas such as ethics, data management and security, and analytics.

"Today's society generates massive amounts of data – rapidly and in many forms," said Don Brown, professor of Engineering and Applied Science and the founding director of DSI. "It's difficult but increasingly important to be able to make sense out of the data. Our goal is to achieve recognized excellence in education and research in the interdisciplinary field of data science."

The Quantitative Foundation was established by hedge fund manager Jaffray Woodriff, a 1991 graduate of UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce. "Data science has emerged to play a critically important role in business, government, health care, the humanities, and beyond," said Woodriff. "This kind of work and research requires highly skilled and trained experts who are capable of succeeding across many disciplines....I believe it will pay tremendous dividends for the students, the commonwealth and society in general."