Major gifts
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.
For those who walk the halls of the state-of-the-art new facility for the School of Data Science in the years to come, it might come as a surprise to learn just how humble its beginnings were.
There was Olsson Hall and the red shed of Dell Building One during the Data Science Institute years. There was the Elson Building, formerly the student health center, a building that retained many of the trappings of a medical facility and was home to many faculty and staff during the early years of the School.
Classes were held, the School expanded, and research continued, but the limitations in proximity and space weren’t always conducive to the sort of collaborative spirit the School was founded on. Fortunately, this was only a temporary arrangement.
Thanks to the donation from Jaffray Woodriff, a new home for the School of Data Science would be built as part of the University’s expansion at Charlottesville’s Emmet-Ivy Corridor, which would also include the new Karsh Institute of Democracy.
Groundbreaking took place in October 2021. And just like the school that would occupy it, this would be no ordinary building.
“We had three design principles,” said Arlyn Burgess, who has led efforts pertaining to the new building’s construction from day one. “They were wellness, sustainability, and utilization.”
Burgess explained that the School wanted to create a safe, healthy, eco-friendly environment where faculty and staff both desired to work and could do their best work.
Beyond the design, Burgess and Phil Bourne wanted the building to embody the discipline that would be practiced there and the principles that had guided the School’s founding — literally and figuratively a School Without Walls.
“There was a feeling that when you walk into the building it should be a physical manifestation of what it is we believe data science to be,” said Burgess.
This meant the building would include exposed steel, open hallways, a large atrium, a corporate commons for discussions with the private sector, and monumental stairs, among other features — all aimed at fostering interaction, openness, and collaboration.
“I think we designed a school to maximize all of those things,” said Bourne.
There will even be a data sculpture. After a lot of brainstorming, and many designs, school officials arrived at something that, in Burgess’ words, “is really quite simplistic in that it is literally bringing raw data up through the building in an architectural scale.” A variety of data sets, she explained, will be deployed, which could tell any number of stories.
The idea is that this will be an interactive experience, Burgess said, with the user experience depending on the perspective from which you are viewing the sculpture.
“We thought that there was something really powerful about that, that you experienced the data through your own lens,” she said.
The School also sponsored an art competition in conjunction with the new building’s opening. The contest, called Data is ART and centered around the theme of “Our World,” invited submissions from all formats and mediums, with the chosen art submissions from finalists set to be displayed at the building.
The new home of the School of Data Science, the School Without Walls, held its public opening in late April 2024, with faculty and staff moving in the following month.