Associate Vice Provost for Data Science – Andrew Connolly

As Associate Vice Provost for Data Science, serves as the Director of the University’s eScience Institute, whose mission is to empower researchers and students in all fields to answer fundamental questions through the use of large, complex, and noisy data. The institute furthers those goals through a large set of education, research, and community building activities. Dr. Connolly is the University’s point person for questions related to data science research and education, directing people to relevant resources and experts.

Dr. Connolly received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Imperial College at the University of London in 1993, and joined the Department of Astronomy at the UW in 2007 where he is now a full professor in the Astronomy Department. He is the William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor, and was formerly a Washington Research Foundation Data Science Chair. Dr Connolly is an internationally recognized expert in the field of astrostatistics and machine learning with 150 peer-reviewed articles that have amassed over 30,000 citations and he has co-authored the book “Statistics, Data Mining and Machine Learning in Astronomy”, which was awarded the  International Astrostatistics Association’s Outstanding Publication Award for 2016. He was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000 to develop visualization techniques for complex data sets, which led to his development of Google Sky while on sabbatical at Google in 2007. In 2017 he founded the DIRAC Institute at the University of Washington, a new center that focuses on data intensive astrophysics and cosmology.

Dr. Connolly continues to teach and maintain an active research program in cosmology, and Solar System science using advanced image analytics, deep learning and cloud computing. HIs primary research focuses on the design of some of the largest astronomical surveys in the world including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Rubin Observatory (a telescope that will image the night sky visible from northern Chile every night for ten years).