Dr. Xinjie Lan joined D2K in May 2022 as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Prior to that, Dr. Lan was an instructor at the University of Delaware where he received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include machine learning theory, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), computer vision, and data science applications. He teaches the capstone course at Rice and additional data science courses and techniques in the Master’s of Data Science program including statistical machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and deep learning. Dr. Lan has collaborated with many partners from industry, government agencies, and research institutes. He has completed over 20 projects addressing diverse topics in social science, manufacturing, biomedical engineering and others. His goal is to impart students with the philosophy of data science for their future endeavors in the big data era, and he focuses on this conceptual understanding rather than simply teaching data science techniques.