[1][2] BIDS was initially funded by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation as part of a three-year grant with data science institutes at New York University and the University of Washington.

[6] Saul Perlmutter established BIDS in 2013 and stepped down as the Faculty Director in December 2023.

[8][9][10] When BIDS was founded in 2013, there were six working groups across the three universities included in the original Moore/Sloan grant, referred to as the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments (MSDSE).

[11] The aim of the MSDSE was to address the major challenges facing advances in data-intensive research, including careers, education and training, tools and software, reproducibility and open science, physical and intellectual space, and data science studies.

[12] The efforts from these working groups led to the founding of the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA)[13] in 2019.