Dr. Claudia von Vacano is the Social Sciences D-Lab and Digital Humanities Executive Director. She is deeply committed to supporting the success of marginalized 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. Dr. von Vacano 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, in the Computing, Data Science, and Society Division. She is the P.I. of measuring hate speech research project with the financial support of Google Jigsaw and BIDS—that employs IRT and Deep Learning. 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 1,400 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.”
