Jaffray Woodriff

Jaffray Woodriff’s passion for data began long before he ran a hedge fund. Like many, he was a baseball fan as a child, but unlike some, he was particularly enamored by the work of legendary, and pioneering, writer and statistician Bill James. 

“I read as much as I could find of his writings, usually two or three times,” Woodriff said. “He was absolutely brilliant with data science and baseball statistics, yet even though he was publishing all of his work, he wasn’t even recognized as someone that knew anything at all about baseball.”

It wasn’t until decades later that Major League Baseball teams widely embraced the statistical tools James was championing in the 1970s. “This sort of highlights how slowly humanity adjusts to great ideas,” Woodriff said. 

Woodriff studied finance at UVA, graduating in 1991. Even before enrolling he’d developed an interest in trading stocks and resolved that he would focus his studies on the goal of becoming a hedge fund manager. He attributes his success in trading stocks to his use of machine learning. 

“Like Bill James was very early to apply data science to baseball statistics, I was very early to apply data science to trading stocks,” Woodriff said. 

He would go on to found the Charlottesville-based firm Quantitative Investment Management in 2003, where he would continue to enjoy incredible success through his systematic use of machine learning in trading markets.

Another passion of Woodriff’s is squash, and he wanted UVA to field a team. But, Teresa Sullivan recalls, as with many aspects of higher education, there were resource limitations. 

“I sat down with Jaffray and basically said, ‘Look, if this is what you want, you’re pretty much going to have to endow it because we’re just not going to have the resources in athletics to stretch it to another team,’” Sullivan says she told Woodriff.

Woodriff would end up supporting the establishment of men’s and women’s varsity squash teams and construction of the McArthur Squash Center.

“It’s certainly a world-class squash facility,” Woodriff said. “I’m very proud of that.”

“I think he was pleased not only that we were we able to do something new, but that we were able to do it on time, on budget, in a responsible way,” Sullivan said. 

Woodriff’s support of new ventures at UVA was only just beginning. For years he had dreamed of a data science-focused school at the University.

“I had always wanted UVA to be the leader in data science,” he said. “And I couldn’t really figure out a good way to make that happen.”

An invitation to a dinner hosted by Sullivan would provide the opportunity he’d been waiting for.

Teresa Sullivan organized a dinner with potential donors, including Jaffray Woodriff, who asked Rick Horwitz about the plans to establish a Data Science Institute at UVA. Woodriff liked what he heard about the institute but had one concern: Who would run it?

“I’m worried that they’re going to put someone in charge who is really academically focused who doesn’t also have applied success in data science,” Woodriff said. In fact, he had someone in mind: Don Brown. 

Woodriff had only met Brown briefly at a conference 12 years earlier but was immediately impressed and viewed him as possessing both the academic credentials and real-world experience — Brown had owned a successful data science consulting firm in addition to his role as a UVA faculty member — to make the institute a success. 

As Woodriff sat at dinner, both excited about the prospect of his dream of a data science institute becoming a reality and concerned about who would be at the helm, he was finally informed that Brown, his ideal candidate, would be in charge. 

“I think I stood up and punched the air with my fist in celebration that it was going to be exactly the person I thought was best,” Woodriff recalled years later, a moment Sullivan vividly remembered as well.

“Don was exactly the kind of person he had seen as the leader for this effort,” she said. 

Woodriff would ultimately donate $10 million to support the institute — a gift that would prove to be just the beginning of his support of data science at UVA. 

“With his first gift, it became legitimate,” Horwitz said of the impact of Woodriff’s donation. “We had money to start doing things.”

Other external supporters would also emerge. Brown recalls that another UVA alum, Scott Stephenson of Verisk Analytics, wrote to the School of Engineering promoting the idea of a program centered around big data and industry. While the Engineering School did not act on it, Brown caught wind of the letter and did follow up. 

"I said, 'Scott, we want to do what you're talking about,'" Brown said. "It was like the melding of minds, we came together," Brown said. Stephenson would provide substantial support over the years and would go on to chair the advisory board for the School of Data Science. 

The Data Science Institute was ready to begin its work.

When the Data Science Institute was launched, there were 11 schools at UVA. The newest was the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, which formed in 2007. Before that, a new school hadn’t been created at the University since the 1950s. 

Jaffray Woodriff had long wanted to see his alma mater be a national leader and pioneer in data science by creating a school dedicated to it. He previously donated $10 million toward realizing that vision, which helped launch the Data Science Institute in 2013. In the years that followed, he decided it was time for something bigger.

“I got more and more excited about the possibility of making a much larger contribution,” Woodriff said. “I could start to see that my idea of starting a school was being taken seriously.” 

Ultimately, the Quantitative Foundation, founded by Jaffray Woodriff and Merrill Woodriff, would pledge $120 million, the largest private donation in UVA history, to create a School of Data Science at UVA, the first in the country. 

While the historic donation from Woodriff unlocked the possibility of a school for data science, more work remained to turn it into a reality — in part because little information existed on how to move forward.

“The University doesn’t really have that much in the way of bylaws or guidance about how you form a school,” said Teresa Sullivan.

“We were kind of making it up as we went along,” she added. 

With Sullivan’s term set to end on Aug. 1, 2018, they would also need the support of a new University president. 

Jim Ryan would take over that month. While new to the role, becoming UVA’s president was a homecoming of sorts. 

After graduating first in his class from the University’s School of Law, Ryan clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He then worked as a public interest lawyer in Newark, New Jersey, before coming back to UVA to join the Law School’s faculty, where he served for 15 years, including as academic associate dean from 2005-09. 

He would eventually be tapped as dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, holding that position from 2013-18, then returned to Grounds again — this time as UVA’s ninth president. 

Ryan remembered his initial reaction when he first learned about the possibility of a school for data science at the university he was now poised to lead. 

“I will confess, I was a little skeptical,” he said. 

More specifically, he said: “I wanted to understand the benefit of having a school as opposed to having an institute.” The key figures behind the idea made a convincing case.

“I talked to Terry Sullivan a fair bit,” Ryan recalled. “And she was persuaded, as I ultimately was, that this was an important enough field that having a school dedicated to it made a lot of sense.”

He also spoke with Woodriff and Phil Bourne. 

“Jaffray made the point that this will never get the attention it deserves, either internally, among students and faculty, or externally, unless there’s a seat at the table for data science — meaning, that there is an independent school and that there’s a dean of this school,” Ryan said. “And he was right.”

Meantime, Bourne sold Ryan on a vision for the new school, one that wouldn’t be siloed off from the rest of the University.

“Once I started thinking about it that way, it became incredibly exciting to me,” Ryan said. 

“It was a different way of creating a school and a different way of interacting,” he explained. “And that’s what ultimately convinced me that this was the right way to go.”

The new president was on board, but considerable work remained to turn this vision into a reality. 

Phil Bourne estimates that he and his team spent about a year on outreach and making the case for a new school devoted to data science. 

He remembers one meeting that included the deans from throughout the University, as well as Teresa Sullivan, who was still president at the time. 

“There was quite a lot of tussling,” Bourne said of the discussions among the 11 other school leaders, with some arguing that there wasn’t a need for a new school and that data science could be carried out in existing ones.

One thing that advocates for a new school had going for them was the track record of success that the Data Science Institute had demonstrated over the previous five years.

“I think people recognized its promise,” Sullivan said of data science and its potential to address new challenges. 

From a practical standpoint, she also noted that the University had adopted a new budget model, one that helped ensure existing departments and schools would be properly credited for courses that were offered. She believed the transparency and clarity of this model may have helped mitigate some concerns about the potential resource impact of a new school. 

Melody Bianchetto, vice president for finance, led the effort to draft a budget proposal for the impact and opportunities that such a school would provide.

Bourne said their efforts pitching the concept of the school helped sharpen its philosophy. 

“It was in those discussions that really the notion of a school without walls came up,” he said. The mission of a new school for data science would not be to compete with other schools, Bourne explained, but to work with them and thereby elevate UVA.

Don Brown said that a key argument for their proposal was the vast potential of the field itself.

“This was an area that was so transformative,” he said of data science, adding that “if we didn’t do it as a school, we wouldn’t really be able to address some of those major transformations.”

By the end of 2018, all 11 deans were supportive. Unfortunately, that information had not trickled down, which Bourne and others realized shortly before a public announcement.

So, the team laid out their plan to the executive council of the Faculty Senate, who, Bourne said, “were completely blindsided.” Then, at the full Faculty Senate, Bourne said their proposal elicited “some pretty visceral reactions,” with professors asking what this might mean for revenue and student recruitment at their schools. 

The reaction was compounded by the suggestion that the School might not award tenure. “While I remain in two minds about the value of tenure, it was clearly a huge sticking point,” said Bourne. “I remember Jim Ryan going to the back of the room to get me a glass of water as I tried to defend the case. He came back and said, ‘I think you will need to rethink this.’” 

Bourne did rethink it, and in retrospect, it is what the School's own faculty expect. Reinventing higher education can only go so far.

A manifesto would ultimately be drafted by Bourne as a response to Faculty Senate concerns with input from the team laying out exactly what a school for data science would do and why it was needed. 

On Jan. 18, 2019, the stage was set to publicly unveil what had been unfolding for months. At a ceremony at UVA’s Rotunda Dome Room, the grant provided by the Woodriffs’ Quantitative Foundation was announced. 

At the event, Ryan, who took over as president just a few months earlier, said the school that would be created would be “one driven by the discovery of new knowledge and a commitment to the public good.” 

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam called it “a momentous day for the University of Virginia and for the commonwealth.”
With the gift now public, efforts accelerated to secure final approval for UVA’s 12th school. 

In May, the Faculty Senate, despite some initial misgivings, voted unanimously to support its creation. The next month, UVA’s Board of Visitors also voted unanimously to approve the plan. 

Finally, at their Sept. 17 meeting, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia made it official, approving a resolution creating the School of Data Science that would “be responsible for the leadership, management, and advocacy of data science education and research.” 

It was the culmination of an improbable series of developments that began just a decade earlier, with Rick Horwitz, Don Brown, and others pitching the idea of interdisciplinary work around big data sets; Jaffray Woodriff’s dream of UVA becoming the pioneering national university for the study of data science; and the hiring of Phil Bourne to make it a reality. A School Without Walls, one that would embody not only the promise of a new field but also the possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration, had at last arrived. 

Arlyn Burgess recounted the January 2019 announcement event and speaking to Woodriff at the lunch that followed. 

“I joked with him, and I said, ‘Hey, Jaffray, a school of data science — who would have thought?’” Burgess recalled. “He smiled, and he said, ‘Well, I did.’”