Donald Brown

In the beginning, there was a group of faculty members: professors at the University of Virginia who kept meeting over the course of two years to talk about Data, with a capital "D." Dr. Donald Brown, a professor in the Department of Systems and Information Engineering, was a leading member of the group.

At the time, President Barack Obama had recently created an initiative to move the United States into the realm of data science, and Don was eager to see the University move in a similar direction.

He wasn’t sure that the University could be convinced to move quickly in this area, but the group kept pushing. They held two large faculty meetings about data science, then referred to as Big Data. At the first meeting, Don says, they saw about 180 attendees. By the second meeting, that number was up to almost 300 interested faculty members from all over Grounds.

“It suddenly clicked: We can have a presence in this space,” he says. The group went to the provost at the time, John Simon, and University President Teresa Sullivan, with their idea to carve out a space for UVA to tackle data science. “And they were all in,” Don says. “We had incredible support from the top, and there was this grassroots, groundswell of effort and of interest.”

Momentum—and funding—grew, and so Don Brown became the founding director of the Data Science Institute (DSI) at the University of Virginia.

First on the agenda was to create the Master of Science in Data Science (MSDS) program. Getting a new master’s program approved by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia is always a harrowing process, Don says, as it can be fraught with wide range of difficulties. But this was not the case with the brand-new MSDS program.

“When I wrote the proposal up and I went to give it to [the State Council], they were incredibly supportive,” he says. “They loved it. Instead of giving us grief about it, they were giving us suggestions of ways to improve it. They were all in.”

In the years since the degree program was founded, Don has enjoyed watching it grow and adapt. The newness of the field itself is part of what makes the MSDS program so exciting.

“The thing about data science is that it’s not like teaching calculus. Leibniz and Newton came up with the ideas, and the field hasn’t changed a lot, for good reason; they were brilliant ideas,” he says. “But it’s not true in data science. Things are changing quickly. It’s fun to watch that and to watch faculty get involved and see the new research we’ve been engaged in blossom and develop.”

• B.S. ​United States Military Academy, West Point, NY 1973
• M.S. ​University of California, Berkeley CA, 1979
• M.E. University of California, Berkeley CA, 1979
• Ph.D. ​University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1985

Dr. Brown is Founding Director of the Data Science Institute, the W.S. Calcott Professor in the Engineering Systems and Environment Department and Co-Director of the Translational Health Institute of Virginia, University of Virginia. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, Dr. Brown served as an officer in the U.S. Army and later worked at Vector Research, Inc. on projects in medical information processing and multi-sensor surveillance systems. He is now President of Commonwealth Computer Research, Inc. which provides data analysis and technical services for numerous private and governmental organizations. He serves on the National Research Council Committee on Transportation Security has served on the National Academy of Sciences panel on High Performance Computing and Crisis Management and on the NRC Committee on Surface Transportation Infrastructure Security. He is a past member of the Joint Directors of Laboratories Group on Data Fusion and a former Fellow at the National Institute of Justice Crime Mapping Research Center.

Dr. Brown has been a principal investigator or co-principal investigator for over 90 research contracts with federal, state, and private organizations. He has over 120 published papers and two edited books. His research focuses on data fusion, knowledge discovery, and predictive modeling with applications to security and safety.

Dr. Brown is a Fellow of the IEEE and a past President of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. He is the recipient of the Norbert Wiener Award for Outstanding Research in the areas of systems engineering, data fusion, and information analysis. He has also received an Outstanding Contribution Award from that society and the IEEE Millennium Medal. The student chapter of the International Council on Systems Engineering has named him the best undergraduate teacher three years in a row (2001, 2002, and 2003). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans . He has served on the administrative committee of the IEEE Neural Networks Council. He is coeditor of the books, Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence: The Integration of Problem Solving Strategies and Intelligent Scheduling Systems. He is also past-Chairman of the Operations Research Society of America Technical Section on Artificial Intelligence and he is the recipient of the Outstanding Service Award from that Society. Dr. Brown's students have won competitions in the Omega Rho honor society, the IEEE, the Brunswick Society, and the Operations Research Society of America.

Awards

• IEEE Joseph Wohl Career Achievement Award 2007
• IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics Award 2005
• IEEE Norber Wiener Award 2002
• IEEE Millenium Award 1999
• Governor's Technology Award, Virginia 1999
• Fellow, IEEE 1996