Twitter Facebook Azer Bestavros, recently named BU’s first associate provost for computing and data sciences, sat in a Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground conference room overlooking the Charles River last February and listened as antiracism scholar Ibram X. Kendi laid out his bold vision: bringing antiracist investigators together with data scientists to tackle racial inequities, he would establish Boston University as the nation’s leading academic institution for data-driven antiracist research. Kendi, who was visiting from American University, had been in talks with BU about joining the faculty—but this was his first in-person meeting with Bestavros. Bestavros, who had been charged with embedding computing and data science across the University in every discipline, from the humanities to engineering to medicine, was impressed. “I was struck by the scale of what he was envisioning and by his conviction that data is essential not only in exposing racial inequities, but also in mitigating those inequities,” he says. He told Kendi that he and his team of civic-minded data scientists would love to collaborate with him, and the two of them talked about the potential to set up what Bestavros called a co-lab, one of many such multidisciplinary partnerships he hoped to forge across the University.