Dr. Claudia Natalia von Vacano is the Founding Executive Director and Senior Research Associate of UC Berkeley’s Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab), including the Berkeley Federal Statistical Research Data Center. Her work advances interdisciplinary approaches to computational research, data science education, digital humanities, and trustworthy AI.
At D-Lab, Dr. von Vacano leads programs that support computational and data-intensive research through training, consultations, working groups, courses, and cross-campus collaboration. She partners with the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society through Data Science Undergraduate Studies and the Data Scholars Program, which she helped establish. D-Lab also houses the Berkeley Federal Statistical Research Data Center, which enables approved researchers to securely access restricted-use microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau and other federal statistical agencies. These resources include detailed household and business data, employment records, health and economic data, and selected administrative records.Berkeley FSRDC |U.S. Census Bureau
A curriculum-development specialist, Dr. von Vacano created and directs UC Berkeley’s Digital Humanities Summer Minor and Certificate Program. She serves as co-principal investigator on a long-standing NSF grant in data science education and directs an NIH summer training grant in computational social sciences. She recently contributed to a Trustworthy AI course for the Berkeley AI Research Center. Her service included the Social Sciences Matrix board, and she continues to serve on the executive committees of the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Belonging Research Center at SUNY Polytechnic Institute.
Dr. von Vacano’s research and training collaborations include the Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Information, Technology, & Experimental Ethics Lab, Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland; the Hrant Dink Foundation in Istanbul, Türkiye; Sciences Po’s médialab in Paris, France; the Mexico-based digital-rights organization Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D); and Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Sao Paolo, Brazil. She has also collaborated with the Heidelberg Centre for Digital Humanities and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of British Columbia and now at the Université de Montréal.
Across these roles and collaborations, Dr. von Vacano builds research infrastructure, educational pathways, and international partnerships that broaden access to data-driven inquiry and promote responsible, inclusive uses of emerging technologies.
Publications
Oh, B., von Vacano, C., & Harding, D. J. (under review). Racialized and Gendered Barriers to Persistence in Undergraduate Data Science. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
von Vacano, C., Spitale, G., & Hofmann, B. M. (in press). Bias in large language models. In G. Spitale & F. Germani (Eds.), Artificial intelligence and information ethics. Routledge.
von Vacano, C. (2025). Significance of annotator’s identity on hate speech detection models. In İ. Engindeniz & Z. Arslan (Eds.), Hate speech: Contemporary issues and debates. Hrant Dink Foundation Publications.
Liao, L. D., Darwish, S., Figueroa, C. A., Manalo-Pedro, E., Pola, S., Jha, M., De Maio, F., von Vacano, C., Kennedy, C. J., & Sachdeva, P. S. (2025).Interrogating racism in the medical literature using word embeddingsAnthology of Computers and the Humanities, 3, 707–724.https://doi.org/10.63744/voHr9u5XsC0n
Janeja, V. P., Sanchez, M., von Vacano, C., Harding, D. J., & Chen, L. K. (2025).Data science career pathways: An institutional ecosystem case study. In EDULEARN25 proceedings (pp. 7792–7798).
Wang, S., Harding, D. J., & von Vacano, C. (2025).Adopting a foundational data science course: A follow-up evaluation. In EDULEARN25 proceedings
Wang, S., Harding, D. J., & von Vacano, C. (2024).Translating a lower-division data science course: Lessons learned and challenges encountered. In EDULEARN24 proceedings (pp. 5127–5132).
Janeja, V. P., Sanchez, M., Khoo, Y. X., von Vacano, C., & Chen, L. K. (2024).Adopting foundational data science curriculum with diverse institutional contexts. In Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 576–582). ACM.
Figueroa, C. A., Manalo-Pedro, E., Pola, S., Darwish, S., Sachdeva, P. S., Guerrero, C., von Vacano, C., Jha, M., De Maio, F., & Kennedy, C. J. (2024).The stories about racism and health: The development of a framework for racism narratives in medical literature using a computational grounded theory approachInternational Journal for Equity in Health, 23, Article 47.
Wang, S., Janeja, V., Harding, D. J., von Vacano, C., & Lobo, D. (2023).Adopting data science curricula: A student-centric evaluation. In INTED2023 proceedings (pp. 8309–8315). IATED.
Figueroa, C. A., Murayama, H., Amorim, P. C., White, A., Quiterio, A., Luo, T., Aguilera, A., Smith, A. D. R., Lyles, C. R., Robinson, V., & von Vacano, C. (2022).Applying the digital health social justice guideFrontiers in Digital Health, 4, Article 807886.
von Vacano, C., Ruiz, M., Starowicz, R., Olojo, S., Moreno Luna, A. Y., Muzzall, E., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Harding, D. J. (2022).Critical faculty and peer instructor development: Core components for building inclusive STEM programs in higher educationFrontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 754233.
Sachdeva, P. S., Barreto, R., von Vacano, C., & Kennedy, C. J. (2022).Assessing annotator identity sensitivity via item response theory: A case study in a hate speech corpus. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
Sachdeva, P. S., Barreto, R., von Vacano, C., & Kennedy, C. J. (2022).Targeted identity group prediction in hate speech corpora. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (pp. 231–244). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Sachdeva, P. S., Barreto, R., Bacon, G., Sahn, A., von Vacano, C., & Kennedy, C. J. (2022).The measuring hate speech corpus: Leveraging Rasch measurement theory for data perspectivism. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP at LREC 2022 (pp. 83–94).
von Vacano, C., Muzzall, E., Reeve, J., Anderson, A. G., & van Nuenen, T. (2020).Building STEAM for DH and electronic literature: An educational approach to nurturing the STEAM mindset in higher educationelectronic book review
Kennedy, C. J., Bacon, G., Sahn, A., & von Vacano, C. (2020).Constructing interval variables via faceted Rasch measurement and multitask deep learning: A hate speech applicationarXivhttps://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2009.10277
von Vacano, C., De Kosnik, A. T., & Best, S. (2017).Digital humanities at Berkeley and the Digital Life Project. In Digital Humanities 2017: Conference abstracts
