The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) is a central hub of research and education within UC Berkeley designed to facilitate data-intensive science and earn grants to be disseminated within the sciences. BIDS was initially funded by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation as part of a three-year grant with data science institutes at New York University and the University of Washington. The objective of the three-university initiative is to bring together domain experts from the natural and social sciences, along with methodological experts from computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics. The organization has an executive director and a faculty director, Saul Perlmutter, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. The initiative was announce