Stanford computer scientist selected to join ambitious Moore Foundation program

Christopher Re, assistant professor of computer science and Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar, today was named a Moore Investigator as part of the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative advanced by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Re was one of 14 leading data scientists so named. Each researcher will receive $1.5 million over a 5-year period to catalyze new data-driven scientific discoveries.

An active member of the Stanford Data Science Initiative, Re said the Moore Foundation awards are unrestricted, allowing researchers to choose the data science problems that promise to have the biggest and broadest impact.

“This is a tremendously exciting opportunity to push forward our DeepDive system,” Re said. “Paradoxically, initiatives that apply to many distinct areas can be more difficult to fund because they do not fall under the purview of any one funding agency. With this award, we are free to work on problems at the intersection of different sciences.”

The Moore Investigator Awards announced today are part of a $60 million, five-year Data-Driven Discovery Initiative within the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Science Program.

The initiative – one of the largest privately funded data scientist programs of its kind – is committed to enabling new types of scientific breakthroughs by supporting interdisciplinary, data-driven research.

“Science is generating data at unprecedented volume, variety and velocity, but many areas of science don’t reward the kind of expertise needed to capitalize on this explosion of information,” said Chris Mentzel, program director of the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative.

Vicki Chandler, chief program officer for science at the Moore Foundation, said many scientific areas are data-rich but discovery-poor because researchers lack tools powerful and sophisticated enough to extract new insights from a morass of findings.

“The Moore Investigator Awards in Data-Driven Discovery aim to reverse that trend by enabling researchers to harness the unprecedented diversity of scientific data now available and answer new kinds of questions,” Chandler said. “We hope that other funders, public and private, will join us in supporting this transformation.”

Re’s goal is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. Trained at the University of Washington in Seattle, Re received the SIGMOD 2010 Jim Gray Dissertation Award for his work on probabilistic data management. He joined the Stanford faculty in 2013 after four years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Winner of an NSF CAREER Award in 2011 and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2013, Re’s work has contributed to scientific efforts including the IceCube neutrino detector and PaleoDeepDive, and commercial products such as Cloudera's massively parallel Impala cluster and Microsoft's Project Adam machine learning initiative.

With the Moore Foundation, Re joins an eclectic network of fellow researchers.

“I am very excited to continue conversations with the other winners who work on a range of fascinating problems,” he said. “This award process has already generated some interesting threads by connecting us with new areas in science.”

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty, established the Moore Foundation to create positive change around the world and in the San Francisco Bay Area by investing in early-stage research to transform – or even create – entire fields. Among other thrusts, the foundation seeks to promote sustainability, protect critical ecological systems and align environmental conservation with human development. In the area of patient care it seeks to eliminate preventable harms and unnecessary procedures by engaging patients and their families in a supportive, redesigned healthcare system.