Director: Dr. Sherrill Hayes

Kennesaw State University was the first university in the country to offer a formal Ph.D. in Analytics and Data Science, with the first students accepted into the program in Fall, 2015. Since then, the Program has maintained an acceptance rate under 10% - making it one of the most competitive graduate programs in the country.

This interdisciplinary research degree trains individuals to translate large, structured and unstructured, complex data into information to facilitate innovation, research, and improved decision making. The curriculum includes heavy emphasis on data structure and capture, algorithm development, graph theory, optimization, machine learning, statistical modeling, and the mathematical foundations to support these concepts. Importantly, the program also emphasizes communication skills - both oral and written - as well as application and tying results to business and research problems. Graduates can either pursue a position in the private or public sector as a "practicing" Data Scientist - where continued demand is expected to greatly outpace the supply - or pursue a position within academia, where they would be uniquely qualified to teach these skills to the next generation.

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