UCLA Fielding School of Public Health recognizes 2026 Master of Data Science Program students
The MDSH degree program currently has 92 students, with 39 in the class of 2026.
Three years after creating a master’s program designed to meet the ever-increasing need of the health industry for data analysis experts, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health celebrated the achievements of the program’s students.
At a June 5 event focused on the master’s students’ research work, UCLA Fielding’s Dr. Sudipto Banerjee, senior associate dean and professor in the Department of Biostatistics, explained the impact of the Master of Data Science in Health (MDSH) program, one of the first such degrees offered within the University of California system, and the students’ “capstone,” or final, projects.
“In the initial proposal, in the first year we had only anticipated there would only be about 25 students that would be admitted … well, it turns out we had about 70 in that first year, and the numbers have only gone up since then,” Banerjee, who also teaches in the MDSH program, told the students. “The training that you have received is going to stand you in extremely good stead as you start the next chapter of your careers.”
In 2024, UCLA Fielding received 332 applications for the MDSH program; in 2025, the numbers reached 429, an increase of nearly 30%. The degree program’s class of 2027 currently has 54 students.
At the June 5 event, eight teams of 4-5 students each presented their capstone projects, the results of a focused, 10-week-long project where the students worked directly on a data-focused problem for a partner organization, including both the public and private sectors.
“It’s the quality of the school, and the program, and really the students,” said Dr. Amy Xia, a vice president with the Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based biotechnology company Amgen, which has hired graduates from the program. "It's been very, very successful - the students work with us on real-world problems, and through the collaboration they’ve been trained on the Amgen culture and the process.”
In 2026, public sector partners included both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Santa Clara County (Calif.) Social Services Agency; private sector partners ranged from the Los Angeles Dodgers to Prenosis, Inc., a health technology company which uses artificial intelligence to deliver diagnostic information for critical patients.
“The teams collaborated with industry partners to tackle real world, data science, business, and public health problems,” said Mia Giordano, the MDSH Capstone coordinator. “Our impressive array of partners reflects the breadth and relevance of our students’ work and highlights how well equipped our students are to solve real world challenges through data science.”
The partners are from across different industries, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, and academia, and the students used data science tools to solve a business or healthcare problem, delivering on a wide range of scopes of work. As an example, the student team collaborating with the UCLA Stein Eye Institute demonstrated that advanced diagnostic methods using data science can predict diabetes-related vision decline more accurately than traditional methods, enabling earlier identification of patients at risk for preventable blindness, faculty said.
“By pairing stronger prediction with clinically meaningful risk factors, their work has clear public health value,” said Dr. Hua Zhou, professor in the Department of Biostatistics and MDSH Program director. “This improves targeted screening and means earlier treatments to reduce the loss of vision by people with diabetes.”
All the student Capstone teams prepared written and oral presentations providing public health and business insights based on statistical analyses and applying professional skills, including working effectively on a team, self-assessment, and team feedback.
The highest rated teams in the 2026 program included the students who worked with the Dodgers in the club’s statistical analysis group; they were recognized with the “Exemplary Final Project Award.”
"Participating in the MDSH Capstone program was a defining experience for our team as it gave us the chance to apply the technical skills we developed throughout the program to a real-world problem,” said Karen Zheng, one of the MDSH student team’s project managers. “Partnering with the Los Angeles Dodgers and working directly with an industry partner pushed us to think about problems beyond our classroom and gain confidence in building something that could affect real decisions.”
