Recent technological breakthroughs in DNA sequencing mean that scientists can characterize an organism’s entire genome in a matter of days. But a great challenge remains in translating that genomic sequence — nature’s data set — into biology.

That translation is fundamentally changing how we study biology.

In the data science domain area of biology, you will find yourself on the cutting edge of the field, working in the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data and how it applies to gene function, disease, microbial ecology, and the assembly and characterization of new genomes.

Spatial data is integrated into our everyday lives and employed in a range of professions. We are all integrated into a complex web of movement, place, and discovery, whether we’re navigating across town or interpreting maps of election results.

UO geographers use spatial data technologies to focus on remote sensing of the changing environment, climate-change analysis, web-mapping, cartography and data visualization, spatial cognition, and spatial patterns in public health.

In the data science domain area of geography, you will be studying how spatial data can revolutionize business, nonprofit, and government worlds.

Usage-based linguistics studies language as a dynamic, constantly changing system. Much of this work involves working with large collections of text or speech – referred to as “corpora.” Examples of readily available real-world corpora include Amazon product reviews and collections of Twitter messages.

Linguists use corpora to help identify patterns and structures in language, providing insights into how we both acquire and lose language skills, how language use varies across people and contexts, and how real-life speech and language evolve. 

In the data science domain area of linguistics, you will learn methods to identify linguistic structures within corpora, gleaning new insights while using the best and latest practices in the field. These methods will allow you to answer basic science questions as well as questions that are of interest to marketing firms, political consulting groups, or other commercial enterprises. So, for example, you can use the knowledge you acquire in the linguistics domain to explore how the use of a word like “cool” has changed over time (a basic science question) or to identify linguistic strategies associated with leading positive product reviews for different product types (a marketing question).

Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing, and analyzing marketing performance to maximize effectiveness and optimize return on investment. Data science applied to marketing data can help a business predict consumer behavior, improve decision-making, and gauge the success of marketing investments.

For example, machine learning and statistical techniques can be used to classify data and detect patterns that might predict a campaign’s success.

In the data science domain area of marketing analytics, you will learn how to see the future, through the lens of both existing and new methods of predictive analytics.