Linking Data Science and Society - Yale School of Public Health

Dr. Bhramar Mukherjee launched the Big Data Summer Immersion at Yale (BDSY) program to teach 28 undergraduate students how data science can improve human health outcomes.

The program brought together students from diverse backgrounds who wanted to strengthen their coding skills and explore career paths in public health, medicine, and data science. Through hands-on training, mentorship, and collaboration, students learned to think more broadly about science and discovered how big data contributes to human flourishing. Faculty "journey lectures" inspired students to reconsider their career trajectories, showing that academic paths aren't predetermined.

• Students gained confidence in biostatistics and learned about data equity as a pillar of health equity
• Participants discovered public health offers more opportunities for systemic community impact than individual patient care
• The program emphasized storytelling in science and taught students to question causation rather than just correlation
• Many students expanded their career visions beyond medicine to include public health research and policy applications