[tgokh]

It may not necessarily be the best option for the OP's daughter, but it is possible to do a PhD that uses data science as a tool rather than the focus. There's a lot of interesting work going on in academia using data science in a variety of fields (like medicine) related to predictive analytics (predicting hospital readmission, predicting therapy outcomes), time series analysis (analyzing EKGs, and other vital sign data) etc. A masters would likely allow you to work on similar projects, but if the goal is a PhD, there are certainly application rather than theory focused research groups across the country