A session with Jevin West can be a geek-fest in the very best way. Out comes the magic marker and next thing you know there’s a white board filled with circles and arrows and nodes illustrating impact factors in a vast matrix you’ve never imagined. It’s Big Data at its finest, a big thing in the information field and a critical area of specialization for this newly hired assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School.

Like many in the field, West actually started elsewhere in academia and let his passion guide him toward information. As an undergraduate biology major at Utah State he gravitated toward the emerging field of systems biology. “I took a systems approach,” he explains. “I realized you had to understand how information flows, and that the whole world is a highly networked system.” He then chose the UW Department of Biology for his Ph.D., in part because of the opportunity to work with Professor Carl Bergstrom, who also studies information in biology.

A dinner with Bergstrom and Bergstrom’s economist father proved to be a pivotal point in West’s career.” At the time, I was thinking about what kinds of problems I was going to attack, to help me understand information in biology,” recalls West. The subject of scholarly publishing arose, and the three began discussing how social and economic factors influence the way in which science is conducted. The conversation shifted to how West’s research methodology might be used to examine citation networks, with an eye toward finding a better way of measuring scholarly output and influence.

West thought it might be an interesting practice exercise; something to take on for a couple weeks. “Well, that two weeks turned into many years and has grown into this big research program, what I call the Eigenfactor project,” says West. The result was a revolution in how citation networks are examined, going beyond mere citation counts to instead examine the mathematics of how the citations are connected and flow. West likens it loosely to the way in which Google revolutionized search engine technology by taking advantage of the Web’s hyperlink structure.

Most importantly, the methodology isn’t just appropriate to citations, but can be applied to all kinds of networks. “The metrics have now become an industry standard within the library area where they used Eigenfactor and article influence, and it’s been used in commercial applications as well.“

West went on to continue his research during two postdoc fellowships, the first at the UW Center for Commercialization, and the second at IceLab at Umea University in Sweden. In both, the emphasis was pulling stories out of big data sets. Throughout, however, a dichotomy persisted: although still thinking of himself exclusively as a theoretical biologist, West was becoming deeply involved with information that was not necessarily connected with his field. It was something of a puzzle.

The solution soon presented itself. And perhaps it is fitting that a person so immersed in extracting data from complex matrixes would need somebody else to connect the dots with regard to his own career. “I was invited to give a talk at the Microsoft Faculty Summit,” recalls West. “After the talk, a very nice, very well-dressed individual came up to me and said, ‘You know what this is, don’t you? This is Information Science. You should consider housing yourself in an Information School.’”

That individual was iSchool Dean Harry Bruce.

Flashing forward to today, West recently became the first of a planned eight new faculty hires at the iSchool. As West explains, once he made the decision to join an Information School, the UW iSchool quickly moved to the top of his list.

“The great thing about this iSchool is that there’s so many things they’re working on,” he says. “Another thing was being on a campus that cared about this sort of thing. Information science researchers embrace interdisciplinary and collaborations across different fields, and we’re connected to very strong computer science and engineering and life sciences departments. There are all kinds of opportunities for collaboration. There’s also potential commercial partners in the area, and I’ve already developed some relationships there.”

Now ensconced in Mary Gates Hall room 330D, West couldn’t be more pleased with his surroundings. His areas of specialty include Data Science, Network Analytics, Scholarly Communications, and Information Visualization. But what really intrigues him as he contemplates his future is the people he’ll have the opportunity to work with.

“Community is important for me, and the community aspect of the UW iSchool is really unmatched,” he says. “You have it at the faculty level, the staff level, and the student level. Surrounded by all these talented people, I feel like I get to learn every single day.

“I’ve already been working with Joe Tennis for over a year on really cool project. We’re looking at how we can use this mapping stuff to auto-categorize Wikipedia and compare that to human-curated categorization. I’ve also been talking with Robert Mason, I’m looking at collaborations with Josh Blumenstock and Emma Spiro.”

In addition to these collaborations, West looks forward to teaching. This fall he will lead a class on research methods for introductory Ph.D. students; later, he is slated to teach Data Science at the undergraduate and masters level.

“Right now, because Data Science and Big Data are so hot, I could probably make way more money outside the university,” says West. “But my passion lies in being on a campus, where you get to interact with people of different backgrounds, people that are really smart and ask good questions, from students to faculty.”

Although West perhaps took an unusual path to get here, he feels strongly that in today’s information-driven world, the UW iSchool is the place to be.

“We’re really in a high growth stage,” he concludes. “We’re on a campus that is very much behind this data-driven movement. For students, this is where a lot of hiring is going to come come from in the future—it will really have a huge impact on many generations to come. That’s exciting.”