Chris Wiggins | Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics

Chris Wiggins is a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the former Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times.

At Columbia he is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics as well as the Department of Systems Biology, and is affiliated faculty in Statistics. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY, a nonprofit that since 2010 has organized once-a-semester student hackathons and the hackNY Fellows Program, a structured summer internship at NYC startups. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU (1998-2001) and earned his PhD at Princeton University (1993-1998) in theoretical physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of Columbia's Avanessians Diversity Award. He is the coauthor of "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms" with Matthew L. Jones and "Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities" with Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig, and Jeanette Wing.

Research Areas

Applied Mathematics
Mathematical Biology
Biopolymer Dynamics
Soft Condensed Matter
Genetic Networks and Network Inference
Machine Learning

Additional information

Professional Experience
- Professor, Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University 2026-
- Chief Data Scientist, The New York Times, 2014-2026
- Associate Professor, Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), Columbia University 2006-2026
- Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), Columbia University, 2001-2006
- Assistant Professor/Courant Instructor, Courant Institute, NYU, 1998-2001
Honors & Awards
- 2014 American Physical Society Fellow
- 2014- Chief Data Scientist, The New York Times
- 2011-2014 Selected as mentor for TechStars NYC
- 2011 Selected among 25 “People to watch in Silicon Alley” (Crains)
- 2010 Selected among 100 “Silicon Alley Insiders” (Business Insider)
- 2007 Janette and Armen Avanessians Diversity Award, SEAS, Columbia University
Education
- PhD, Theoretical Physics, Princeton University
- BA, Physics, Columbia College