What can mouse movement reveal about decision-making in the brain?

How do workplace restrictions shape health insurance coverage?

Can ancient plankton, captured in data, help explain future oceans?

These were some of the questions that undergraduate and master’s students in Columbia’s Data Science Institute (DSI) Scholars Program explored over the past semester—and presented to a room of faculty and peers on May 6.  

The DSI Scholars Program pairs Columbia students with faculty-led research projects across the university. Each student receives a stipend and, over the course of a semester, spends 8-10 hours per week embedded in a research team. 

Student presenting for DSI Scholars

The Spring 2025 projects spanned disciplines. Over the semester, 16 student participants were immersed in fields as varied as neuroscience, climate science, public health, law, and machine learning. Some worked with video data to analyze animal behavior. Others parsed insurance claims and court decisions, built models to trace ocean warming, clustered microscopy images, or cleaned noisy biological data. In every case, student contributions advanced real faculty research and gave students a chance to apply their skills to meaningful problems.

Each project started with a clearly defined question—and followed it with evidence, modeling, and iteration.

Applications for the Fall 2025 student cohort will open this summer. Faculty applications closed in April.  Learn more at datascience.columbia.edu/research/columbia-dsi-scholars/

Spring 2025 DSI Scholars and Faculty Mentors

  • Zubair Atha — Decoding mouse behavior using fixed embeddings
     Mentor: Dr. Alex Dranovsky (Psychiatry)
  • Jared Donohue — Historical analysis of U.S. cloud seeding with LLMs
    Mentor: Dr. Kara Lamb (Earth and Environmental Engineering)
  • Alan Ma — Risk modeling for autonomous vehicle safety in NYC
    Mentor: Dr. Kaizheng Wang (Industrial Engineering & Operations Research)
  • Amy Ai — Non-compete enforcement and employer-sponsored health insurance
    Mentor: Dr. Xuelin Li (Columbia Business School)
  • Justin Mathew — Concentration-aware modeling for microbiome decontamination
     Mentor: Dr. Tal Korem (Systems Biology)
  • Sarah Korb — Neural state dynamics and antisocial behavior after stress
      Mentor: Dr. Christoph Anacker (Psychiatry)
  • Anna Chen — Reconstructing sea surface temperatures from the last interglacial
     Mentor: Dr. Jerry McManus (Earth & Environmental Sciences)
  • Mingxuan Wang — Hybrid diffusion and reinforcement learning for medical imaging
    Mentor: Dr. Yading Yuan (Radiology)
  • Anushka Agarwal & Pei Tian — AI pipeline for phytoplankton identification from microscopy images
     Mentor: Dr. Joaquim Goes (Climate School)
  • Annika Hsi & Xiao Wen — Mapping phytoplankton functional types using satellite hyperspectral data
     Mentors: Dr. Joaquim Goes & Dr. Jinghui Wu (Climate School)
  • Ruibin Lyu — Quantum hardware verification via error syndrome modeling
    Mentor: Dr. Dan Rubenstein (Computer Science)
  • Arvind Nagabhirava — Data valuation of ocean carbon observations
    Mentor: Dr. Galen McKinley (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)
  • Brigid Meisenbacher — Citation network analysis in the U.S. court system
    Mentor: Dr. Suresh Naidu (Economics)
  • Ho-Chin (Jim) Yang — Bayesian inversion workflow for modeling volcanic ash dispersal  
    Mentor: Dr. Einat Lev (Earth & Environmental Sciences)