Quinnipiac University revealed its new Masters of Informatics program, which, starting fall 2025, is open to students with any prior bachelor’s degree.
“It’s a very broad field that opens a lot of doors,” said Chetan Jaiswal, associate professor of computer science and now the program director. “It’s data and information related to several different aspects.”
Informatics is defined as the study, design and development of information technology that generates, stores, processes and presents information, according to Egnyte Enterprise.
Quinnipiac’s program consists of 30 credits that students can take across one or two years.
“The launch of the MS in Informatics program at Quinnipiac’s School of Computing and Engineering marks an exciting step forward in preparing our students for the date-driven future,” wrote Taskin Kocak, dean of the School of Computing and Engineering in an email to The Chronicle. “We have been working two years to develop this truly interdisciplinary program, bringing together four schools, to offer a diverse and comprehensive curriculum. We are thrilled to offer this opportunity and look forward to seeing the impact our graduates will make.”
According to Quinnipiac’s website, this program provides students with hands-on projects and exposure to real-world challenges that promote collaborative, interdisciplinary learning opportunities.
To start off, students coming into this program will take three mandatory courses to learn programming, how to store and manage data and data information, security and ethics. After that, the student gets a choice from three different concentrations — health, legal and data.
Health informatics is a relatively new interdisciplinary field in the healthcare industry that uses information technology to organize and analyze health records for improved healthcare outcomes, according to Northeastern University.
Legal informatics refers to the application of computer techniques and emerging technologies within the field of legal practice, which includes the use of law firm management software, legal process automation, predictive jurisprudence and much more, according to LegalProd.
Quinnipiac is one of the few universities that offer this specific subfield of informatics as a masters program.
“We’re the third or fourth school that is actually offering this,” Jaiswal said. “This is a brand new thing. It’s connected to technology, that gives it a much stronger foundation. It’s very ambitious and very futuristic.”
Since it combines different disciplines, the faculty for this program will be made up of professors with backgrounds in law, health sciences, computing, data and cybersecurity.
This program is what has been missing from Quinnipiac, according to Jaiswal.
“I think that data and information should be a part of everyone’s curriculum no matter what your major is,” Jaiswal said. “Because we are living in this age where data and simple programming should be part of everyone’s curriculum. We want to make sure that our graduates are equipped with all these new technologies and literacy in terms of data itself, because data is money. We didn’t have any master’s program that deals with data as a general concept.”
The demand for this has been great, since it is one of the few STEM master’s programs that does not require a STEM bachelor’s degree.
“I think everyone should do this master’s program because no matter what your domain is, you’re always going to be dealing with data,” Jaiswal said. “I think everyone has a part to play in this program. It touches the life of every major. It has a potential to be very, very successful.”
