Tim Dennis
Director, Data Science Center — UCLA Library
Los Angeles, CA · timdennis@ucla.edu · tim-dennis.com · LinkedIn: jtimdennis · GitHub: jt14den · ORCID 0000-0001-6632-3812
Experience
Los Angeles, CA
- Lead campus data services and computational research support; supervise 4 FTE staff (1 vacancy) and 5 DataSquad student staff directly, 15 student consultants across program history; ~10-12 total team including cross-functional project teams (ML/AI, Dataverse/Data Management, Emerging Technologies, GIS, OSPO)
- Manage annual operating budget of approximately $600K across multiple accounts
- UCLA Dataverse (2018-present): 312 registered users, 1,603 datasets, 142,300+ downloads, grown from 15 files (2019) to 54,655 files (2026); harvested 1,014 legacy Social Science Data Archive datasets
- Redivis (2022-present): selected and licensed the platform, negotiated restricted-dataset access, navigated FERPA/PHI/HIPAA compliance approval for P3/P4 restricted research data; scaled from 5 workflows/444GB (Jan 2023) to 2.9PB processed (2024); supports UCLA Political Science research publishing in APSR, PNAS, BJPolS, AEJ: Policy; cited at FORCE11 2024
- DataSquad (2021-present): founded and direct this student consulting workforce, 24% of total service volume, 100% career placement (10/10 students) at McKinsey, Amazon, World Wide Technology, Ekimetrics, CVS Health, AIG, Stanford
- Research support enabled a $5M Dana Center for Neuroscience and Society grant (Carceral Ecologies partnership) and federal NIH/NSF/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grants (BioCritical Studies Lab); together these directly supported 2 of 6 (33%) of UCLA's 2024 Public Impact Research Award winners
- Co-led ESRI licensing transformation (Jan 2023), doubling monthly new user registrations on average; lead coordinator for campus response to the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy
- Sponsored and participated in DSC/DataSquad AI/ML pilot projects (2023-present): participant in a Library Systems Team/DSC experiment evaluating OCR, spaCy NER, and OpenAI models for automated metadata extraction on the 10,000+ document Campaign Literature Archive against Dublin Core/MODS standards (2023); sponsored a DataSquad prototype exploring LLM-assisted Data Management Plan generation (Nov 2023); provided hands-on technical support on a DataSquad oral history AI-transcription project, including Redivis AI-layer integration and Hugging Face model setup
- Nominee, UCLA Administrative Management Group Excellence in Leadership Award, 2025 — nominated by direct reports
La Jolla, CA
- Provided consultation and training on data discovery/reuse, research data management, and statistical programming; administered UCSD's local Dataverse instance
- Proposed and led redesign of the Data/GIS Lab into a studio-style cross-disciplinary data services space (opened Fall 2016)
- Organized UCSD's inaugural Software Carpentry Workshop (Fall 2015); advocated successfully for the Library to become a Software Carpentry Affiliate; became a badged Software/Data Carpentry instructor
- Built a recurring data skills series with UCSD's School of Global Policy and Strategy — curriculum design and reproducible-workflow (TIER methodology) training for graduate students
Berkeley, CA
- Co-designed, opened (2008), and managed the Library Data Lab; provided quantitative reasoning consultation, 15 hours/week, to a lab serving 1,000+ users/year
- Established the Library's LibTech internal training program (Google Analytics, web widgets, Python, Drupal)
- Drupal developer for the library — architected multiple production sites; implemented Agile methods, Vagrant, GitHub, Travis CI, and Behavior-Driven Development with the dev team
Education
University of California, Berkeley , Berkeley, CA
Focus: XML technologies/standards, information design, user experience research
Millsaps College , Jackson, MS
Cross-institutional & systemwide leadership
- UC Carpentries Jan 2020 – Present
Founder and Systemwide Lead; Co-Chair, 2024-present
- Ten-campus UC network; 28 workshops delivered (2023-2025), 2,896 total attendees
- UC Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Jan 2023 – Present
Co-Principal Investigator, Sloan Foundation Grant ($1.85M, awarded Spring 2024); Lead, UC OSPO Education Working Group
- Contributed to conceptualization, funding acquisition, and proposal writing; partnership with five other UC libraries
- UC Love Data Week Jan 2018 – Present
Co-founder & Executive Sponsor (co-founded during COVID-19)
- Provides executive leadership and institutional sponsorship, supervises campus and systemwide organizers, teaches select sessions
- 75 individual sessions across three years (2023-2025); 2,098 unique registrants (2023), 2,595 (2024)
- UC Research IT Committee (RITC) Apr 2017 – Present
Research Facilitator
- Research Data Services Working Group Jan 2023 – Present
Steering Committee member; co-lead, UCLA Research Data Roadmap development
- UC GIS Week Aug 2020 – Present
Sponsor & Strategic Supporter — enabled the GIS Librarian to establish this systemwide initiative
- UC Open annual conference Jan 2023 – Present
Co-developer, in partnership with five other UC libraries; 125 attendees
- DataSquad International
Co-lead with Paula Lackie (Carleton College)
Grants & funding
- IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program Jan 2022 – Jan 2025
Program Director. RE-252335-OLS-22, $237,839
- Delivered 15 lessons (14 proposed); 28 authors across 14 institutions; DMP 101 lesson achieved global Library Carpentry curriculum adoption
- CRediT roles: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition (Lead Grant Writer), Project administration, Software, Supervision
- UC OSPO, Sloan Foundation continuation grant Jan 2023 – Present
Co-Principal Investigator & UCLA Lead. $1.85M (UC-wide allocation, partnership with five other UC libraries)
- Norman Powell Philanthropic Gifts Jan 2023 – Jan 2024
Program Director & Fund Manager
- Secured $50,000 in new donor funding (2023-2024) for DataSquad expansion
- Managed the final year of a $201,285 continuing gift (2020-2023) for DSC education programs
Publications
- L2 Voter History and Demographic Dataset [Dataset] Jan 2024
UCLA Library. Redivis
Supervisor role — national 50-state voter registration/demographic dataset with persistent identifier
- Meeting the Challenges of Data Support Services in Academic Libraries: Advocating for an International DataSquad Model Jan 2024
D. Wiltshire, P. Lackie, Tim Dennis, E. Parke. Data Culture in Academic Libraries, ACRL
- From a Data Archive to Data Science: Supporting Current Research Jan 2021
Tim Dennis, et al.. In Herndon, J. (Ed.), Data Science in the Library. Facet Publishing
- I See, UC, We All See Carpentries: Collaboratively Scaling Workshop Instruction Across a University System Jan 2021
Tim Dennis, et al.. The Carpentries Blog
- Library Carpentry: Tidy Data for Librarians Jan 2020
Tim Dennis, et al.. Zenodo
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3954067 - Top 10 FAIR Data and Software Things Jan 2019
Tim Dennis, et al.. Zenodo
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2555498 - Using R and ggvis to Create Interactive Graphics for Exploratory Data Analysis Jan 2016
Tim Dennis. In Magnuson, L. (Ed.), Data Visualization. Rowman & Littlefield
Selected presentations & invited talks
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RDA Plenary, Sweden (2023); SCaLE 22x, Pasadena (2025); UC Tech (2024); CNI (Nov 2025); IASSIST & CARTO, Halifax (2024); Linux Foundation "What's Next for Open Source," New York (2024)
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Invited panelist, UN OSPOs for Good (United Nations, New York, 2024 — invitation only)
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Presenter, FORCE11 Conference on UCLA Redivis infrastructure (UCLA, Aug 2024)
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"Radical Partnerships: Expanding Academic Collaboration in Data and Computational Sciences" — CNI Spring 2022 Membership Meeting, San Diego
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"The Carpentries: Building Local and Global Communities of Practice to Improve Data Skills" (invited) — AGU Fall Meeting 2019, San Francisco
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"From a Data Archive to Data Science" — IASSIST 2019, Sydney, Australia
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"Positioning Libraries to Support Data Science" (invited keynote) — Library and Information Association of South Africa Conference 2017, Johannesburg
Teaching & program building
- 2023-2025 instruction Primary instructor or co-instructor for 22 workshops/sessions, personally reaching 1,118 learners across UCLA, UC Carpentries, UC Love Data Week, and standalone programming
- Guest lectures UCLA DH 201 (Intro to Digital Humanities); UCLA Labor Studies Capstone (OpenRefine + Tableau); UCLA NS 191H/NS192BX Neuroscience Honors Seminar; UCLA IS262A "Data Management Plans and the Role of Libraries" (Oct 2025, published/DOI'd)
- Teaching outside UCLA Carpentries Instructor Training co-instructor (100+ learners total); Library Carpentry workshops for other institutions (200+ learners), 2022-2025
- Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory/Governance Group Co-Chair (2021-present) — defined the formal lesson adoption process; led adoption of four new lessons (Intro to Python, Computational Thinking, Data Management Planning, AI for GLAM); Lesson Development Trainer (2024-present); Instructor Trainer (2017-present); Instructor (2015-present)
- "Intro to AI for GLAM" Code Sprint (Jan 2024) Co-hosted a seven-hour global code sprint with the Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee to advance this AI-literacy lesson toward stable release; 14 participants from 9 institutions across the US, UK, Germany, and South Africa (including Hugging Face, the Smithsonian, and The National Archives UK); 14 issues closed, 7 pull requests merged, accessible SVG flowcharts and alt-text added throughout the lesson
- "Agentic Research Workflows" Lesson (2026, in development) Author, Carpentries Workbench lesson on using AI coding agents for research work while preserving validation, reproducibility, and research judgment — covers CLI-first workflows, project-grounding via CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, and validation strategies (synthetic data generation, domain plausibility, cross-AI auditing); adapted from the UC Berkeley D-Lab "Vibe Coding for Research" workshop
Professional service, governance & standing
- Research Data Alliance (RDA) Co-Chair, Libraries for Research Data Interest Group (2023-present)
- The Carpentries Instructor Training Leadership Group (2021-present); member since 2016
- GO FAIR USA FAIR Data Stewardship Interest Group (2021-present)
- Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in Social Science (BITSS) Catalyst (2017-present)
- Center for Open Science Ambassador (2016-present)
- Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Official Representative (2015-present)
- IASSIST Member since 2009
Technical skills
Languages: Python, R, HTML, CSS, JSON, PHP, SQL
Technologies: MySQL, SQLite, LaTeX, Bash scripting, Git, Jupyter, RStudio, Stata, SAS, SPSS, Drupal