Our History
In Fall 2016, the Provost convened a Task Force to consider the future of Data Science at SMU. The university had faculty with research interests in Data Science in nearly all its colleges: Lyle, Dedman, Dedman Law, Cox, and Meadows. At that time, the university had an online Master's program in Data Science and several other on-campus Master's degrees in related fields. The Task Force report made several recommendations for how to accelerate the Data Science research enterprise at ÃÛÌÒ½´and to offer opportunities to all our students in this field. The first recommendation was to establish a Data Science Institute, which came to fruition in Fall 2020. The second recommendation was to establish an interdisciplinary undergraduate major and minor in Data Science at SMU. This has also now been accomplished, with both programs also launched in Fall 2020. In 2022, the name was changed to the O’Donnell Data Science and Research Computing Institute. The institute was placed under the leadership of the inaugural Peter O’Donnell Jr. Director, an endowed position created through a 2022 gift from the O’Donnell Foundation. The foundation’s new gift provides endowments and operational funding for building interdisciplinary initiatives and external research partnerships that employ high-performance computing for large-scale data analytics, advanced AI/ML methods, and future computing technologies.