Aug. 27, 2025 – CSUCI Assistant Professor of Statistics Isaac Quintanilla Salinas
has always viewed data science as the treasure map to information about everything
from movies to marketing to biomedical science.
Data science can tell you who is going to theaters and who isn’t, or whether people ages 20 to 40 prefer thrillers, comedies or action movies. Data science can measure how many people with a certain type of blood protein might develop cancer. Or data science can unlock whether men or women are more likely to shop for Coke or Pepsi. At what time of day, and how much they’ll spend, and the list goes on and on into a multitude of sub datasets.
So when he and several CSUCI faculty colleagues developed the new Bachelor of Science (BS) Data Science, they designed it to fit with just about any student’s area of interest.
“We created a major accessible to all students, regardless of their area of interest,” Quintanilla Salinas said. “This prepares them for what they face in the real world. We wanted to incorporate the ‘data science triangle.’”
The “data science triangle” encompasses 1) computer science, 2) math and statistics and 3) content—which could be anything at all. The idea is to teach students math, statistics and computer science so they have the tools to read whatever data content they want to collect in their field of study, be it biology, health science, art, psychology, business, etc.
“Personally, when I teach statistics, I see it not as math, but as science,” Quintanilla Salinas said. “Statistics uses mathematics, but statistics itself is the scientific study of randomness and variation. We gather data and we use the statistics to explain it with numbers or model visualizations (pictures and graphics).”
Before he earned a Ph.D. in Applied Statistics from the University of California, Riverside, Quintanilla Salinas earned a B.S. in Biology from Cal State Monterey Bay and a Master’s in Public Health from San Diego State University. While growing up in San Bernardino, his interests always included the human/physiological side of math and statistics.
“I always wanted a mix of math and science,” he said. “When I was at Monterey Bay, I discovered a statistics internship and that’s where I learned about biostatistics. It was where science meets living things.”
The oldest of four, Quintanilla Salinas is a member of the first generation in his family to attend college. His parents fled El Salvador during the Salvadorian Civil War of the 1980s.
“My father was a factory worker and my mother was a caregiver,” Quintanilla Salinas said. “They came here chasing the American Dream.”
As a statistician and data scientist, Quintanilla gets to work with other researchers from a multitude of other disciplines, which is probably what he enjoys the most, he said.
“With statistics, I gained the skills to work with a lot of different people in a lot of different disciplines, and I really do enjoy learning about different topics,” Quintanilla Salinas said. “There are a lot of interpersonal relationships you develop with other researchers as you analyze data.”
Quintanilla Salinas, Mathematics Chair Geoffrey Buhl and fellow statistician Alona Kryschenko—an Associate Professor of Mathematics—acquainted local students in fourth through 12th grades with their first Datathon this past April, which was a friendly competition in which students could learn the basics of data science while working together on a common project.
Mathematics Program Chair and Professor of Mathematics Geoffrey Buhl said Quintanilla Salinas has been a valuable addition to the program ever since he joined CSUCI in 2022, always going the extra mile for his students.
“Professor Isaac Quintanilla Salinas has been instrumental in designing and implementation of the new B.S. in Data Science,” Buhl said. “He helped lead a team of faculty who brought a Datathon to campus that highlighted career opportunities in Data Science to local high school and community college students. Isaac routinely holds weekly extracurricular sessions to help students learn software tools for data visualization.”
Quintanilla Salinas is taking a well-earned break this summer so he can hit the ground running in Fall of 2025 with the launch of CSUCI’s new Data Science major.