This semester, the data course (BMGT/ENES438A) is introducing a new professor, Dr. Brian Danielak! I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Danielak and ask him some questions about his journey to QUEST.
Dr. Brian Danielak
Dr. Danielak completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Buffalo, where he studied Chemistry and English! He loved his undergraduate seminars and the opportunity to explore everything from Shakespeare to advanced chemical reaction kinetics and abstract algebra, which led him to majoring in both subjects. He also studied abroad for some time at the University of Oxford, really emphasizing how much he loved getting a diverse education.
After graduation, he initially wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry, but changed his mind and looked for something different. Afterwards, he discovered UMD’s Ph.D. program in science education research, which was a perfect fit! During his time at the university, he taught several classes on science education, such as one on science methods for elementary school teachers. After UMD, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in games and learning at the University of Wisconsin and later at Northwestern University studying engineers in practice.
After that, Dr. Danielak completed a postdoctoral program at Michigan State University (MSU), where he first started learning data science. At the time, he was introduced to R and Python while taking some statistics courses. Immediately, he was drawn to the softwares: he loved the intersection between coding and art that he saw with the graphics he made and learned first-hand how important visualizations are to understanding data. Afterwards, he would help MSU develop their introduction to computational modeling and data science classes, which helped foster an interest in teaching data science classes.
Despite going to many universities, he knew that he wanted to return back to UMD! He started in 2019 as a keystone professor for ENES100, and now teaches ENES100, some other keystone classes, and most importantly, the QUEST data course, 438A!
He was drawn to QUEST because he really enjoyed his honors seminars during his undergraduate at University of Buffalo and wanted to teach a similar class, which happened to be the data class!
Overall, he loves the QUEST community and can tell that the students are really passionate about what they learn, which he sees in their presentations and the questions they ask. Furthermore, his goal in teaching 438A is that he wants students to look beyond the data and find visualizations first while analyzing their data, which he hopes they will learn by the end of the semester. We are super happy Dr. Danielak joined the QUEST team, and as a student in his class, I cannot wait to see what he teaches next!