Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at the New York Times. 

At Columbia he is a founding member of the Department of Systems Biology, the executive committee of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering (IDSE http://idse.columbia.edu ), and IDSE's education and entrepreneurship committees. He is also an affiliate of Columbia's Department of Statistics and a founding member of Columbia's Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2). He also teaches as part of the Lede program, a certification program in data, code, and algorithms organized jointly between Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on applications of machine learning to real-world data, particularly biology.
He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY (http://hackNY.org), a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized 9 student hackathons and a summer startup internship program, now hosting its 5th class of hackNY Fellows. 

Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU and earned his PhD at Princeton University in theoretical physics.