In virtually all sectors of the modern economy, understanding behaviour is critical. From healthcare and education to the services sector, businesses and organisations recognise the value of harnessing vast quantities of data to provide insights into how people behave. Combined with an understanding of psychological theory, this can generate insights that help explain complex patterns of human behaviour that lead to informed decision making that can drive progress and innovation.

Our innovative MSc Behavioural Data Science course focuses on bringing together state-of-the-art data science techniques with advanced psychological theory. You will leave with a unique ability to extract meaningful, theory-based insights from complex human data, as well as a diverse portfolio of work to demonstrate these skills to future employers.

What youll study

This course covers a broad range of topics and skills related to social and behavioural data and its analysis, both from an academic scientific point of view and from the point of view of a professional data scientist. Many of these topics and skills-machine learning and artificial intelligence proficiency with a range of quantitative tools and programming languages big data analysis data visualisation management of complex, unstructured data sets reproducible data analysis and others-are currently in high demand in both academic scientific research exploring human behaviour and in data science roles that explore behavioural data.

Careers and employability

Your future career in behavioural data science

Data science as a discipline is now found in many large organisations across private businesses, the health and medical sectors, in government, and in the IT (especially web-based) services sector, and as such represents one of the key jobs of the future.

It is a growing field as society produces not only more data about how people behave, but also data that are more widely and easily accessible, alongside increasingly advanced tools for gaining insights. In this context it is important that data scientists working on human data are able to not simply gain insights about trends in data, but use psychological knowledge to understand these.

If you are already qualified or work in the fields of computer science or engineering, this Masters course can help you stand out from your peers. If you're already working in data science, this course is ideal to continue your professional development by expanding your behavioural and statistical expertise.

Outside of industry, data science skills in academia are also increasingly in demand, and this MSc would also provide the skills required to move into highly skilled research roles or commence a PhD.