Across almost all scientific disciplines, the instruments that record our experimental data and the methods required for storage and data analysis are rapidly increasing in complexity. This has been particularly true for astronomy, where current and future instruments produce data sets of a size and complexity not accessible with traditional methods. Within the Astronomy Department at UW, researchers at the Institute for Data-Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology (DiRAC) are working on a whole range of subjects related to the question of how to turn data into physical understanding. In this talk, I’d like to give an introduction into why DiRAC exists, who we are, what we work on, the resources we can provide, and why you might want to get involved with DiRAC (hint: we have cookies!).