CDS Graduate Student Speaker Katie Atherton
Graduate Student Speaker Katie Atherton on Listening and Communicating: What Data Science Really Teaches
Esteemed professor and associate provost Dr. Azer Bestavros, Professor of Biology and my advisor Dr. Jennifer Bhatnagar, Director of the Program in Bioinformatics Dr. Joshua Campbell, and the friends and families joining us today, good morning. And to the Class of 2026, congratulations!
When I was invited to speak today, I was asked to talk about the shared experiences that we all might resonate with as Computing and Data Sciences graduates. And at first I was a bit confused – why would you ask me? For those who know me, you know my time as a Bioinformatics student was not typical. I was one of very few bioinformaticians to not study human health-related data. I spent years of my degree, not behind a computer, but digging up soil across Massachusetts and working at the wet lab bench to extract the data I would later analyze. I was the first person from the Bioinformatics program to become an URBAN Biogeoscience and Environmental Health trainee.
But, as I stressed about not feeling like a good representative of the Computing and Data Sciences experience, my friend Natasha wisely asked me, who even would be? And what I found, thinking back through each of my classmates' journeys, is that none of them looked alike either. So maybe the place to start is right here, with mine.
A long, long time ago, in the year 2019, I started my PhD in the then-departmentless Bioinformatics Program here at Boston University. I took all of the same classes in my first year as the rest of my cohort, working on group projects and learning new techniques like sequence alignment and building networks. And at the end of my first year, my fellow students and I became scattered, following our curiosity to join labs across the university: in Computational Biomedicine, Engineering, School of Medicine, and Computer Science. I followed my own curiosity to the Biology Department, where I worked with Dr. Jennifer Bhatnagar to understand how human activity in cities impacts trees and their microbiomes.
Over the last six years, my PhD experience has been defined by having one foot in the world of data science, and the other in my advisor’s world of Biology. I did research alongside people passionate about fungi, but took classes with Python code wranglers. Still, every two weeks, the bioinformaticians would get together to talk about our research over pizza. It’s here where I learned about the true breadth of the field of data science, and the cool projects everyone was doing in every corner of campus. From discussions about predicting medicine effectiveness or identifying differentially expressed genes in different types of cancers, to talks on building new tools to more easily analyze data or developing models to understand the mechanisms behind bacterial colony morphology, I learned something new from every single presentation.
Looking back, those pizza-fueled seminars embodied what data science really is. And so maybe that is the unifying thread, the fact that no two data science students have the same experience. Because data science is not just a course of study, but a window into other fields. Data science gives us the tools to ask and answer the questions that our curiosity piques across a breadth of topics. It’s the reason why I identify myself as not only a data scientist, but also a microbial biologist, not only a data scientist, but also an urban ecologist. And I’m sure that many of you here today see yourselves as cancer biologists, or economists, or climate scientists, or engineers, in addition to data scientists. But all of those identities only matter if we know how to communicate across them.
It is because of this diversity of experiences that a degree in data science trains us to be not just scientists, but listeners and communicators. Early on in my PhD, I met with officials in Boston’s Department of Parks and Recreation. In that meeting, I confidently claimed that the data I would produce in my PhD would be able to inform how they select sites for making new parks and green spaces in the City of Boston. This idea was quickly shut down when they told me that they don’t get to decide which locations become parks, so this data, while maybe interesting to me, wouldn’t be useful to them. Instead, the Parks Department asked me if I could help them understand how to better manage the trees they planted along our streets – trees that were dying within a couple of years of planting.
I spent the remainder of my PhD trying to answer this question. I worked alongside microbial ecologists, earth scientists, and city planners to do my research. I spoke with and learned from scientists, students, policymakers, journalists, and non-profits about my work and what it meant for them. This is a key part of our training as data scientists. We learned that in order to understand the data, we don’t just need to understand how to do math or how to code, but we need to understand the people we are working with – what are their questions, how would they use the data, what can they feasibly do about our findings? That moment in the meeting with the Parks Department, learning to listen before I assumed I knew the answer, became the most important lesson of my PhD. And I think it's one we all share, even if our stories look completely different.
Today, we are gathered here as one Computing and Data Sciences unit, representatives of Boston University’s investment in not just interdisciplinary research, but convergent research, bringing different fields together to solve problems none of us could tackle alone. Throughout our time here, we have learned pieces of other disciplines, we have carried our methods to research across campus, and we have brought perspectives from our cross-disciplinary experiences back to our fellow data scientists. And wherever we go next, we will blend our data science foundations with insights from across fields to tackle society’s hardest challenges, maybe the same challenges we heard about over our seminar pizza slices – personalized medicine, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence – and the ones we haven't even imagined yet.
So, Class of 2026, as you walk out of these doors today, I hope that you follow where your curiosity leads you, that you continue to listen and learn from those you work with, and that you never forget that behind every dataset, there are people, and that the best thing your data science degree gave you is the ability to serve them well.