Increasing Adoption of Applied Data Science in Nuclear Physics

Scientific software has been a key accelerant of progress since the widespread proliferation of computing access in the modern era. Whether it takes the form of a large-scale, community supported project like SciPy or a simple analysis and plotting script that will never leave your hard drive, our adoption and creation of software has fundamentally transformed the way science is done. In recent years many vital pieces of software infrastructure (operating systems, programming languages, core numerical libraries, etc.) have also received investment from partners in industry and academia, suggesting a clear benefit to public contributions to software projects rather than developing tools in-house and behind closed doors. In some ways, one can view this as a digital Manhattan Project -- a global effort to design and maintain a sustainable cyberinfrastructure for science, industry, and everyday life. In this talk I will highlight the importance and potential impact of embracing such an open source philosophy in scientific research, with a particular focus on tools built to enable applied data science studies in nuclear physics. This will be accompanied by a few select examples from my own research along with some brief mention of other advances being driven by others in the field.