Last week’s announcement of a $15 million grant by the MassMutual Foundation to support data sciences and cybersecurity research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a big win for the state’s flagship campus – and for the Pioneer Valley economy.
The investment will help position UMass to continue its state-of-the-art education in two fields where steady job growth is expected. The money will pay for additional faculty on campus and help establish a security training center in Springfield, home of MassMutual.
The grant over 10 years, one of the largest donations ever to UMass Amherst, will provide $12 million to the Center for Data Science. It was established last year to study how best to learn from large amounts of data and apply that knowledge to specific disciplines. Among the center’s goals, according to UMass, is “creating new technology to manage and gain insight from big data while also educating tomorrow’s data scientists.”
The money will be used to add faculty, double the number of data science courses and triple the size of the master’s degree program in computer science.
This continues MassMutual’s commitment to data sciences at the Five Colleges. Last year, the company invested $2 million over four years to support “women in data science” programs at Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges. And in September, MassMutual opened its data science center in downtown Amherst.
The other $3 million in the latest grant will go to the Cybersecurity Institute at UMass, an interdisciplinary program designed “to address the critical, cross-industry need for innovative security research … Working with partners in government, industry, and academia, the institute seeks to advance scientific and societal understanding of pressing issues related to the field.”
In addition to hiring more faculty, the grant will help establish the institute’s new certificate program at the MassMutual Foundation/UMass Springfield Center for Training in Cybersecurity.
Nick Fyntrilakis, president of the MassMutual Foundation, said the grant aims “to take these leading data science and cybersecurity research centers to the next level, and to ensure that both the Pioneer Valley and the commonwealth will be at the forefront of these emerging areas and a top destination for these important disciplines.”
And UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy described the relationship as “a private-public collaboration that will uniquely benefit the commonwealth. With this support, our researchers will expand our knowledge of data science and its uses and develop new cybersecurity systems to protect information networks.”
When MassMutual opened its data science center in Amherst last year, a networking event attracted 80 students from the Five Colleges area to learn about applying computing and analytics skills to a variety of jobs in the Valley. Getting students who are studying in those fields linked to jobs in the region is critical, Richard K. Sullivan Jr., president of the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council, said at that event.
The MassMutual money is the second major grant benefiting the Cybersecurity Institute announced this year. In January, the National Science Foundation awarded $4.2 million for a CyberCorps Scholarship for Service program on the Amherst campus. It will give financial and other support to 28 graduate and undergraduate students over the next five years. In exchange, once those students graduate, they will agree to work for a government agency for at least two years in cybersecurity.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent occupational outlook report, the demand for those information security analysts will grow 18 percent from 2014 to 2024, “much faster than the average for all occupations … as these analysts will be needed to create innovative solutions to prevent hackers from stealing critical information or causing problems for computer networks.” The jobs pay well, with a median annual salary of $90,120 in 2015, according to that agency.
The MassMutual-UMass collaboration is a forward-thinking boost that will pay benefits on campus and in the region for years to come.