The University of Toronto Data Sciences Institute (DSI) fosters the success of interdisciplinary data sciences research and partnerships by facilitating access to infrastructure and research supports through several programs to be launched in Fall 2021/Spring 2022.

The Office of Data Science Engagement assists University of Toronto (U of T) researchers with external collaborations, contracts, commercialization and major grant opportunities through several activities:

• External Engagement and Partnerships: We identify opportunities for collaborative research, training, and commercialization with the private sector, and facilitate research and training partnerships with government, public organizations, academic institutions, and community groups. 
• Grant Writing Support: For large-scale, cross-disciplinary collaborative grant applications to external funding agencies and organizations, we provide support in the development of proposals and with grant writing.
• Contracts Facilitation: We liaise with the U of T Innovations and Partnership Office on behalf of CRTs to facilitate contract negotiations and data access agreements.

The Internal Peer Review (IPR) program connects researchers across disciplines, providing grant review support with funding applications to DSI programming and external organizations.

The DSI provides researchers with access to highly skilled Software Developers to facilitate the development of application-level research software that is accessible, used across disciplines and supports reproducible processes and pipelines.

We advocate on behalf of the DSI community to facilitate applied research computing access to expand resources, including for sensitive data and to guide the DSI community on the computational infrastructure available to them and how to access it.