SACRAMENTO, CA – The California Education Learning Lab (Learning Lab) announced today that it is awarding over $8 million across 13 grants in response to Learning Lab’s funding opportunity Grand Challenge: Building Critical Mass for Data Science.

Cal Maritime has been awarded $445,000 in faculty development and interdisciplinary collaboration grants that aim to embrace data science as an opportunity to build new pathways, modernize majors, attract historically underrepresented students into STEM, and deepen both civic and interdisciplinary learning.

For the “Building and Bridging Data Science in Solano County” project in partnership with Solano Community College, Cal Maritime was awarded $185,000 in interdisciplinary collaboration grant funding. Cal Maritime was also awarded $260,000 in faculty development grant funding for the "Community of Networking Faculty Investigating Data Ethics" project. 

Nearly 70 unique institutions from the California Community Colleges, California State University, and University of California systems were part of 43 project teams that applied for the Data Science Grand Challenge grant opportunity, and ultimately 34 unique institutions are part of the 13 awarded projects.

Faculty development projects will increase faculty capacity to teach in the data science field, including approaches such as (but not limited to): enhancing the ability of data-science adjacent faculty to teach data science, incentivizing data-science adjacent graduate students to teach data science, accessing existing faculty development programs, or creating new programs.

Interdisciplinary projects will explore curricular collaboration between data science and application domains (e.g., business, medicine, natural science, social sciences, or engineering) and/or across domains in the humanities, such as philosophy, rhetoric, history, and literary studies.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AWARDS HERE