Claudia von Vacano

Dr. Claudia von Vacano is the Executive Director of the D-Lab and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, and is on the boards of the Social Science Matrix and Berkeley Center for New Media. She has worked in policy and educational administration since 2000, and at the UC Office of the President and UC Berkeley since 2008.

Dr. von Vacano is deeply committed to supporting the success of underrepresented students including women, racial/ethnic minorities, first-generation college-going, and speakers of English as a second, and she has worked extensively with these groups at various stages of the educational pipeline. She has created outreach and intervention strategies through the UC Office of the President and she is currently the program director of a $3 million NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) initiative under the leadership of Faculty Director David J. Harding and with cross-university governance including the Associate Provost of Data Science and Information and Dean of the Information School. She is also co-PI with Karen Chapple, City Planning Chair, College of Environmental Design of a Chan Zuckerburg Initiative grant to provide professional development for housing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each year through the D-Lab and Digital Humanities at Berkeley, Dr. von Vacano oversees programs including 300 computational and data-intensive workshops and 1,200 consultations. She co-developed the core curriculum for the Digital Humanities Summer-only Minor and Certificate program at UC Berkeley. She is the lead online course developer of the SAGE Campus, “Introduction to Applied Data Science Methods for Social Scientists.” She is the P.I. of an online hate speech research project with the financial support of the Anti-defamation League and Google Jigsaw—that employs IRT and Deep Learning. 

She received a Master’s degree from Stanford University in Learning, Design, and Technology. Her doctorate is in Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation from UC Berkeley. Her expertise is in organizational theory and behavior and in educational and language policy implementation. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, among others, have recognized her scholarly work and service contributions.