Women In Data Science

When Jennifer Widom began her career in computer science, it was a relatively narrow and specialized field. Three decades later, computer science has become an interdisciplinary field that touches on broad swaths of society and promises solutions to global problems such as healthcare and sustainability, she says. “Computer science used to be a niche. But (it) has become much more broadly used, broadly applicable across all fields. Instead of it just being a narrow study of software and hardware, it's now a lot about what you can use that software and hardware for in other fields,” says Widom. Indeed, learning about the relationships between math, computers and music prompted Widom to make a radical career change. Her undergraduate degree is in music, and she was on a path to become an orchestral trumpet player. But a course focused on computer applications for music was so intriguing she shifted her studies, eventually becoming a computer scientist and the dean of the School of Engineering at Stanford. Incre