Wall Street’s hunger for data scientists fed by NYU

Data scientist.

It may be the hottest job title on Wall Street. It’s also the most ill-defined. The name didn’t really exist a decade ago, and today almost anyone with some coding or data know-how can claim it.

New York University is stepping into the breach by starting a doctoral program in data science in September to shape the emerging discipline. It’s one of the first such programs in the nation and builds on master’s degrees at NYU and other schools. MIT is gearing up a doctoral degree that includes data science, and Harvard plans to jump into the field with a master’s program in 2018.

In the near absence of degree programs, investment firms must sort through the wannabes and find skilled data scientists from fields like physics and math.

“The term is a fairly loose term, and it can mean anything from somebody who’s an extreme expert in machine learning all the way down to someone who’s really more of a data analyst, preparing and cleaning data and producing charts, and it can mean everything in between,” said Matthew Granade, who oversees Point72 Asset Management’s data science unit, Aperio.

NYU is doing more than just filling the unquenchable demand for data wizards. It’s declaring that it’s a separate discipline, much like chemistry or history. NYU housed its Center for Data Science, which started a master’s program in 2013, in a separate Manhattan location, adding to its independence.

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Among academics, there are diverging views about whether data science should be its own discipline, said Ronald Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association, a group that includes statisticians in academia and government. While he sees data science emerging as a separate discipline, some academics are less certain and consider it a combined set of skills and ideas drawn from computer science and statistics, he said.

“Whether or not it is its own field, or will be its own field, I think it’s a bit of a question,” said David van Dyk, a statistics professor and incoming head of mathematics at Imperial College London.

NYU professors discussed this question at length and decided that data science is sufficiently distinct from computer science and statistics and deserves its own academic center, said Vasant Dhar, a professor of data science who helped start the doctoral program. The field incorporates everything from linguistics and psychology to neurology.

“Every university is struggling to figure out what is data science,” said Jeannette Wing, the new director of Columbia’s institute who was hired from Microsoft and has a doctorate in computer science. “It’s emerging, it’s big, it’s not going to go away, and I think it’s going to transform fields, professions and sectors.”

The term “data scientist” was used rarely in academic circles before two executives popularized the title in 2008. Dhanurjay Patil, who ran the data team at LinkedIn, and Jeff Hammerbacher, who managed the data group at Facebook, were both under pressure from human resource departments to come up with an appropriate title for their team members.

“We didn’t know what to call ourselves,” said Patil, who until January served as the chief data scientist at the White House. “Jeff was like: ‘Research scientist sounds too academic, economist makes statisticians see red, and vice versa. So how about data scientist?’”