[daturkel]

I'm going to chime in to disagree strongly with this. I've seen and worked with lots of non-CS PhDs in data science who have been terrific. It's pretty common too—there's even the Insight program that trains PhDs to go into data science [1]. I don't think it will be seen as a downside and will instead show that you know how to do research and solve problems.

[1] https://insightfellows.com/data-science

[adeelk93]

Anecdotal, but I’ve worked with dozens of PhD data scientists, and not one of them had a CS PhD. The most common one I see is physics, followed by math. (And I don’t work in a physics-related field.)