Mark Hansen joined Columbia Journalism School in July of 2012 to lead the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, after a decade of shuttling between the East and West coasts. At the University of California, Los Angeles, his work created a triangulation of data, art, and technology, with appointments in the Departments of Statistics, Design Media Arts, and Electrical Engineering, and he was a Co-Principal Investigator for the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, an NSF Science and Technology Center devoted to the study of sensor networks. While in New York, he was a long-standing visiting researcher at the New York Times R&D Lab and a consultant with HBO Sports.
Mark earned a PhD in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994, and his ability to craft stories through algorithm, computation and visualization led him to Columbia’s School of Journalism, where he teaches courses on data and computational journalism. In addition to his technical work, he also has an active art practice involving the presentation of data for the public. His work with Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp at the Office for Creative Research has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the London Science Museum, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, and permanent displays in the lobbies of the New York Times building, the Public Theater, and the Jerome L. Greene Science Center in Manhattan. In addition to his graduate degrees in statistics from Berkeley, he also earned a BS in Applied Math from the University of California, Davis.
