Michael Colaresi, the William S. Dietrich II Professor of Political Science and research and academic director for the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security, has been named associate vice provost for data science. His work applies computational tools like machine learning to examine issues of national security, political violence, human rights and disinformation.
Since arriving at Pitt in 2017, he has worked to improve access to data science and training across the humanities and social science communities, including developing computational and visual tools for domain specialists to work alongside computer scientists. He founded the interdisciplinary Pitt Disinformation Lab, as well as co-creating a new major in Computational Social Science. As associate vice provost, he will work with Pitt leadership to advance data science efforts and develop a strategy to implement the goals and actions of the Data Science Task Force.