Mara Blake
Head, Data & Visualization Services
North Carolina State University
Emily Griffith
Director of Consulting/Associate Professor of the Practice
North Carolina State University
This briefing will provide an update on the “Models for Sustainable and Inclusive Data Science Consulting and Collaboration in Higher Education” project generously sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The project leveraged the successful collaboration between the Libraries, the Data Science Academy, and the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University (NCSU) to provide interdisciplinary data science consulting to the campus. The NCSU model utilizes a mix of staff, faculty, and graduate student staffing to serve users across all the colleges of the university. Driven by an interest in approaches to structuring data science consulting in higher education and a relative dearth of recent literature on the topic, the presenters convened a cohort of experts from a variety of institution types to explore the topic. The cohort enthusiastically engaged with different facets of administrative models for data science consulting to identify considerations for structuring programs. The project briefing will share the successful structure of the project, the initial considerations identified by the cohort, and details on forthcoming output from the project.