Greetings!
I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July holiday.
Last week, I began the Dean’s Guest Column with the first of two parts, where here I focus on research.
One of my duties as the senior associate dean of faculty and research is to manage and advocate for a strong infrastructure to support high-quality research. As I tell the new faculty each year at orientation, “We want to remove barriers and do all that we can so that you can be successful.”
One aspect of success for a faculty member tasked with research is to publish in the top academic journals of one's discipline. To facilitate this, the College invests heavily in our research infrastructure, which includes the Mendoza Research Team. The team currently consists of three data scientists and the director of the Mendoza Behavioral Laboratory (MBL), four highly qualified professionals devoted to advancing our research mission.
The data scientists assist the faculty with research by doing a considerable amount of data preparation, such as data wrangling, tidying messy data and combining disparate data sources into a unified dataset ready for analysis by the faculty. The team also assists with a variety of services, including data acquisition and serving as a liaison on data-use agreements between Mendoza researchers and groups such as ND’s Center for Research Computing, General Counsel, data vendors, as well as Notre Dame’s Research Office (NDR). Mendoza’s data scientists include:
- Brandon Greenawalt was a double major in computer information systems and philosophy and currently is enrolled in the MS in Data Science program at Notre Dame. Brandon has worked in data science (though not always with that title) since 2014 across multiple groups on campus. He also is tasked with many administrative matters of the group as the data science program director.
- James Ng, senior data scientist, joined the Mendoza Research Team in 2019 after previously serving in a similar role in Hesburgh Libraries’ Center for Digital Scholarship as an assistant librarian. James has a Ph.D. in economics, which bodes well for his work on archival financial data so widely used in Finance and Accountancy.
- Ray Alavo joined the Mendoza Research Team in 2019 after working as an application developer with the Mendoza IT group following his graduation from IUSB with a master’s degree in computer science in 2017. When we were short-staffed in this area, Ray provided help and began to upskill in data science, leveraging his data engineering experience.
Think of the data scientists as a one-stop shop for both research support and data procurement. Faculty researchers can request assistance with either research support or data procurement by simply filling out this request form. Please note that this is a new process and replaces the RMan process. The RMan process was developed chiefly by David Yeh and Pete Pietraszewski. Because this group of dedicated data scientists has a deep knowledge of our faculty research, they can oversee the College’s data acquisition in collaboration with the library, primarily Pete. Many thanks to David and Pete for their work in helping faculty acquire data over so many years.
The other part of the Mendoza Research Team involves the Mendoza Behavioral Laboratory (MBL), which provides support to faculty conducting research involving individuals, groups and organizations. The MBL manages two participants pools comprised of (primarily) Mendoza undergraduates and community members, including residents of the South Bend region, alumni, staff and graduate students. The behavioral lab is overseen by Letecia McKinney, who earned her Ph.D. at Virginia Tech and previously held faculty positions at Wisconsin and Immaculata University.
A published author of academic articles herself, Letecia is well-positioned to continue to help enhance our behavioral research. Faculty interested in using the MBL should contact Letecia to discuss their project and visit the lab’s website (also linked from the more general MBL page) for information on how to use the lab for a behavioral study. Although we are waiting for approval from Notre Dame Research to resume in-person studies, researchers should submit participant requests for the fall semester by August 1. Along with so many others, Letecia found creative ways to meet the challenges of the campus shutdown this spring and still managed to collect data successfully.
In addition to the Mendoza Research Team, our faculty is supported by the extensive resources of the Hesburgh and Mahaffey libraries. The College also buys large amounts of archival data from a variety of specialized firms and collects data from publicly available sources, such as Twitter or web pages where we are able to scrape information (e.g., text and tables).
With those introductions and that background, let me introduce the new Mendoza Research Team webpage, which offers a variety of useful sources of information.
I also want to make the same offer as I did last week: If there is anything that I can do for you or if you want to talk about anything, such as when you think something is not as it should be or if you have ideas for improvement, please contact me.
Best wishes for a restful and safe summer,
Ken Kelley
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research
Edward F. Sorin Society Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations