Former London Centre for Nanotechnology PhD students Marc Warner and Angie Ma launched a new initiative aimed at helping academics make the transition to careers in data science. Data science is the set of skills and techniques necessary to find, store, process and draw insights from the vast quantities of data now available. This provides a new route for scientists to start using their skills in industry.
“Right now, there is huge demand for highly skilled, highly quantitative people in industry”, Marc Warner explains, “academics obviously don’t want to waste the technical skills they have spent years developing. They should know the variety of ways their skills could be useful and how to go about getting to best opportunities outside academia.”
Along with Daniel Hulme, lecturer in Computer Science at UCL, Marc and Angie founded The ASI to help make the transition to a new career easier for academics. The ASI run full-time, 8-week fellowships in data science, that are completely free for fellows.
“Scientists already have 90% of the skills required to be a data scientist. When you add the extra skills needed to work in industry data science, the work that scientists can do is incredibly valuable.” says Angie, “It’s really important to us that the Fellowship is free. We want more scientists to know this is an option, and have the opportunity to use their incredible skills to benefit society.”
Data Science has been called ‘the sexiest job of the 21st Century’ by Harvard Business School. So far the ASI have run three fellowships, with 50 PhD students and Post-doctoral researchers from top universities like UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial having gone through the programme into a new career.
The next ASI Fellowship begins 11th January 2016.
Interested candidates are encouraged to apply at: www.theasi.co/fellowship where more information on the ASI Fellowship programme is available.
