Introducing the CDN Blog Series

20 July 2021

What is the CDN?   

The Career Development Network (CDN) is a group within ADSA that supports the professional development of early career data scientists.  Members are primarily early-mid career data scientists employed by academic and non-academic institutions who participate in scholarly research (published and available to the public) and/or teaching, training, or outreach at a higher-education level.

The CDN is run by an executive committee of 5-6 members.  After excellent terms, Dani Ushizima (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) and Justin Kitzes (University of Pittsburgh) ended their terms as co-chairs of the CDN executive committee.  Their replacements, Alexander Franks and Maryam Vareth, are joining Garret Christensen (U.S. Census Bureau), Ciera Martinez (UC Berkeley), Lauren Ponisio (University of Oregon), and Micaela Parker (ADSA, Ex Officio).

Recent and Upcoming Activities

For most of us, it was a challenging year in which we saw many disruptions to our activities and daily lives.  At the CDN, we too had to adapt many of the plans and proposed activities. Last year, we held a free and virtual 2020 ADSA Annual Meeting. This year we’re excited that the annual meeting will be back in person.  We just announced the curated sessions for the 2021 Annual Meeting, which will take place in Savannah, Georgia on November 10-12. Stay tuned for more information about the CDN in-person networking event at the meeting.

In addition to participating in the ADSA annual meeting, the CDN runs an annual Seed Grant program, designed to promote and support efforts by members of the CDN to thoughtfully incorporate data science best practices into university education, training and research programs. This past year, we had three winning proposals:

•  Caselet+: Inclusive Data Science Problem Solving Skills Building at Scale (Lujie (Karen) Chen & Shimei Pan)
• Data Science By Design: Best Practices of Visual Storytelling (Ciera Martinez, Sara Stoudt, Váleri Vásquez, UC Berkeley, Smith College)
• An Inaugural Data Science Summit at UC Santa Barbara (Alexander Franks, Allison Horst and Michael Beyeler, UCSB)

You can read more about these proposals here. We won’t be running the Seed Grant program again in the same format as last year, but we have funds available to support our members and their data science career development activities this year. Stay tuned for more information.

The CDN Blog Series

This year, we’re putting a renewed focus on sharing content via the CDN Blog Series. We plan to use this blog to promote knowledge and skill sharing with new developments across  areas including:

• Computing, software, and reproducibility
• Pedagogy
• Tools and methods
• Diversity and inclusion in Data Science
• Career development, professional opportunities, and advice

We will solicit posts from CDN members or other ADSA affiliates who want to share their favorite tools, strategies, and data science projects, or to promote existing resources and publications.  We will also use blogs to share perspectives on data science careers through spotlight interviews with our own CDN members. If you’re interested in contributing to the community blog please send a note to info@academicdatascience.org. More to come!

If you’re interested in joining the CDN, please fill out this form.