(Williston Library at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass. Photo credit: John Phelan.)

MassMutual (Springfield, Mass.) has announced a partnership with Mount Holyoke College and Smith College to pilot the Mass Mutual Women in Data Science Program. The $2 million, four-year higher education initiative aims to provide what the insurer calls a deep undergraduate education in an increasingly in-demand specialty. The MassMutual Women in Data Science Program follows the August 2014 launch of the MassMutual Data Science Development program based in Amherst, Mass.

“This initiative speaks volumes to the importance we place on developing smart, new talent in the emerging field of data science,” comments Roger Crandall, chairman, president and CEO, MassMutual. “MassMutual is proud to partner with these two outstanding colleges to further the advancement of women in this exciting and important discipline.”

Together with the Amherst-based program, the MassMutual Women in Data Science Program seeks to advance data science and build a critical mass of talent in the five-college area that also includes Amherst College, Hampshire College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Through these programs, MassMutual plans to hire between five and 10 recent graduates from top colleges in the fields of mathematics, computer science and statistics. Over a three-year period, the new employees are provided a combination of coursework, applied projects within MassMutual and training; all of which are the equivalent of a post-graduate degree, MassMutual reports.

The insurer’s $2 million investment in the Women in Data Science Program will fund five visiting faculty positions and the development of a data science curriculum. The curriculum will include natural language processing, machine learning, behavioral economics, applied statistics and various computer science subjects.

“Mount Holyoke College is committed to educating a talented and diverse group of future women leaders, and to innovation in this emerging field; a field that is all about asking the right questions, identifying patterns, generating narratives from those patterns, and responding ethically to the challenges posed by data,” comments Sonya Stephens, VP, Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty, Mount Holyoke. “This partnership with MassMutual offers a tremendous opportunity to connect liberal learning and the Data Science initiative at the College to opportunities that exist in both the academy and the workforce.”