As the summer of 2019 drew to a close, Jack Van Horn – with his wife and children – moved across the country from Los Angeles to Charlottesville to join the School of Data Science and the College of Arts of Sciences in the Psychology Department.

“The opportunity to have a joint faculty position here in psychology and in this new School of Data Science was just too good to pass up,” he says. “It’s a great opportunity.”

Before joining the University, Jack spent more than a decade working at two of California’s premier schools. From 2007 to 2013, he worked with neuroimaging at the University of California, Los Angeles and crossed the city to work at the University of Southern California from 2013 up until his move to Charlottesville.

“I’d like to see the University of Virginia be a major power player in the data science of neuroscience."

The importance of data science came to him long before his days in Los Angeles. “I’ve just always been interested in the brain,” he said.

Jack’s work with data began while he was studying for his PhD in London. He started to look into neuroimaging. “[The brain] is the source of all the data we could want,” he says. “The brain is interested in itself and understanding itself.”

In order to uncover more about the brain, Jack asserted that data science will be at the center of the undertaking. Jack understands that different practices are necessary to analyze, process, model, and visualize this important data, but he also appreciated how far we’ve come.

Jack recalled a time just after his doctorate: “I was asked to buy the hard disk so that it would store all our big neuroimaging data… [and I] bought the biggest disk I could afford to buy, and it was 4GB. Now I could eat 4GB for breakfast. It’s really nothing.”

This anecdote reminded him just how far technology has advanced, and he hopes for an even brighter future with the School of Data Science. “Because it’s a school, there’s going to be all sorts of educational opportunities,” he said. This critical effort can’t be carried out alone.

“There’s an old-fashioned notion of the lone scientist,” he noted. “That probably still exists, but modern science is a team science.”

To reach its full potential, Jack insisted on establishing a data commons that supports collaboration across individuals and studies. A team equipped with the right tools and knowledge is needed to sort through all the collected data. Jack couldn’t overstate the importance of collaboration in the field of data science.

“It's a longitudinal study looking at boys and girls who've been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and looking at them from using neuroimaging,” Jack explained. “I'm looking at full genome sequencing as a multifactorial neuropsychological assessment.”Now a part of the University of Virginia, Jack continues to be a part of a research project funded by the NIH that he helped start eight years ago.

Through this neuroimaging, Jack studies structure function and conductivity in the children’s brain. He also coordinates the data-collecting efforts of this project which involves several major research hospitals such as UCLA; the University of Washington; the University of Colorado, Denver; and now UVA.

"The study of the brain is intimately and fundamentally linked with data science.”

As for his hopes for the future of the School of Data Science, “I’d like to see the University of Virginia be a major power player in the data science of neuroscience,” he said. To reach this apex, high performance computing will be required as well as a diverse team working together.

Neuroimagining in relate data science isn't for the faint of heart, but Jack provided some advice for those interested. “For any scientific interest you might have, if you can explore data associated with it – plot it, examine it, do some simple analyses of it – you gain that much more of an appreciation for that scientific topic. For me, it was the brain. As a student, I read all sort of texts on brain anatomy, function, how the brain works, etc. But it was only when I could get some data read in, to write code around it, plot results, that I could make the best sense of what I was being taught."

"For me now, after nearly three decades in the field of neuroimaging, the study of the brain is intimately and fundamentally linked with data science.”

Dr. Van Horn is actively seeking doctoral students to begin in Fall of 2021.

Profile by Connor Masterson

Awards:

Fellow of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM)

UCLA Neurology Distinguished Teaching Award

Jack Van Horn

Diane Wendelken

Jason Williamson

Brian Wright

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