Charlottesville High Student Receives Summer Mentoring from Data Science Faculty

Before starting his senior year at Charlottesville High School, Matthias Zimmerman wanted to make the most of his summer by exploring ways to further his research interests. 

After meeting Siri Russell, associate dean for diversity, equity, inclusion, and community partnerships at UVA’s School of Data Science, at a volunteer event an opportunity arose: Russell connected Zimmerman with Terence Johnson, an assistant professor at the School of Data Science with an interest in public policy. 

It proved to be a perfect match for Zimmerman, who was excited to contribute to Johnson’s study of the behavior of New York Police Department officers, a research project that included developing a tool that could help predict whether certain kinds of police training — such as instruction on handling mental health crises — affect the likelihood of complaints against officers. 

Johnson and Zimmerman went to work on all the key components of conducting a data science project: cleaning multiple datasets, merging them together for analysis, and doing the investigative work needed to understand what the data meant. 

All the while, Johnson said, Zimmerman asked critical questions about the numbers they were seeing and sought out new data about the NYPD to help strengthen their analysis. 

“If you’re excited or interested in a topic or curious about some subject, there is definitely a way to pursue it,” Johnson said. “Especially today, we have immense amounts of data and computational power, and there are endless opportunities to contribute to our understand of the world.”

The partnership proved fruitful for both Johnson and Zimmerman. 

“As a faculty member, you often forget how fun it is to do research and explore reality through quantitative analysis,” Johnson said. “Working with people who are just discovering these kinds of ideas and modes of thinking can be a strong reminder of why you were drawn to this kind of work in the first place, and how lucky you are to be doing it.”

With Johnson’s help, Zimmerman said he learned how to scrape data from websites then organize it in spreadsheets, as well as different modeling techniques.

Highlighting the possibilities of data science and the opportunities it can create has long been a key mission of the School of Data Science. The collaboration this summer between Zimmerman and Johnson is emblematic of the powerful impact that work can have. 

“It is really interesting to see what questions can be answered through data analysis, and I definitely can see myself applying into the Data Science School at UVA. I think that this kind of research is really helpful to give young people insight into what you can do in college and throughout your career in whatever you are interested in,” Zimmerman said.