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.While working at various educational institutions, she managed multi-million dollar budgets and successfully implemented large-scale projects. She is also the lead online course developer of the SAGE Campus Introduction to Applied Data Science Methods for Social Scientists.  Claudia has created a meta-organization at UC Berkeley: Data Science for Social Good.  Under this rubric, she is leading an online hate speech research project with the support of the Anti-defamation League that employs machine learning.  She is deeply committed and invested in supporting diversity in data science through a partnership with the Data Science Division and the Data Scholars program.  The D-Lab is also working closely with the College Futures Foundation on college going patterns and career success.  Career Pathways is an area that Claudia has worked on at the UC Office of the President and within the context of committee work investigating Next Generation opportunities for PhDs within and beyond academia. The Career Pathways work has been undertaken with the leadership of Dean Anthony J. Cascardi, Dean AnnaLee Saxenian, and Data Science Division Faculty Lead Cathryn Carson.   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.