Brian Wright is a self-described “nontraditional academic.” He says his younger self would be surprised to see him teaching at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science, which he helped launch a few years ago.
“I never saw myself working at a university when I graduated, especially not in this field,” he said.
In 2002, he graduated from the University of Tennessee with a bachelor’s degree in economics, and three years later earned a master’s in public administration from the same university.
Those degrees led to more than a decade of consulting and numerical analysis work for the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies in his hometown of Washington before he was recruited back to his alma mater, which had just received a major grant related to his work at the Pentagon.
In the evenings, he was earning his doctorate in higher education and falling in love with the academic environment. “I was given a large aperture to explore machine learning during its early days in the 2010s,” he said.
Wright teaches the only prerequisite class in the School of Data Science. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
When UVA began searching for its core data science faculty, Wright was back in D.C., building George Washington University’s master’s program in data science, which grew to be the university’s fastest-growing graduate degree.
In 2019, the late UVA professor and founding dean Philip Bourne convinced him to come to Charlottesville and help build the University’s newest school.
“Creating the school while operating it is a bit like building the plane while we’re flying,” he said. “It’s been a lot of pressure to be so new at such an old university, but also super rewarding.”
Since 2019, he’s helped build out the School of Data Science’s undergraduate program, launching a data science minor in 2021 that became UVA’s largest within two years, adding undergraduate and doctoral programs and hiring more than a dozen faculty members.
Last year, Wright won UVA’s All-University Teaching Award for his work teaching machine learning and a foundation of data science class that is the only prerequisite for the major.
When designing the degrees, he and his team took a broader view of data science, looking beyond its roots in computer science and statistics.
