Anthony Suen
Executive Director, Master of Computational Social Sciences
Master of Computational Social Sciences, UC Berkeley
Built UC Berkeley's data science education and access programs — the kind of workforce pathway SB-53 asks the CalCompute consortium to analyze
Anthony Suen is executive director of UC Berkeley’s Master of Computational Social Sciences, which he launched as the campus’s first graduate degree pairing social science methods with computational tooling. He was previously director of programs at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, where he founded the Data Science Discovery Program. He joined the campus’s data science initiative in 2015 as its first staff member and has spent the decade since building the programs that put computing tools and research experience in front of students who would not otherwise reach them — the same question of equitable access to computational resources that SB-53 sets out as CalCompute’s purpose.
The Discovery Program connects UC Berkeley students to applied research projects with academic, government, nonprofit and industry partners, giving students supervised research experience while partner organizations get analytical work they could not otherwise staff. Suen’s involvement in the campus’s data science community began before the job existed: as a graduate student he launched the Data Science Collaborative, the first data science club at UC Berkeley.
Alongside Discovery he founded much of the rest of the campus’s data science education infrastructure — Data Science Modules, Data Scholars, Data Peer Consulting, the National Workshop on Data Science Education and the UC Berkeley Cloud Meetup — and his infrastructure team created Ottergrader, an automated grading tool for computational coursework. In 2019 he received the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award, which recognized his work empowering students, forging connections and advancing strategic innovations across the division, the campus and beyond.
Suen holds a master’s in international policy from Stanford University and a master of information management and systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information, where he graduated in 2015. He was a data science fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and a Schneider fellow in the Beijing office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and he co-founded Energyfolks, an environmental nonprofit.