Education

• Ph.D. in Operations Research, Cornell University, 2013

  • Concentration: Applied Probability and Statistics

  • Advisors: David Ruppert and Giles Hooker

  • Dissertation: On Generalized Additive Models for Regression with Functional Data

• M.S. in Operations Research, Cornell University, 2013

• B.Sc. (Hons.) in Statistics, University of Manitoba, 2008

Professional Experience

• Data Scientist, Displayr, 2017-2024

  • Developed and tested features (mostly written in R and JavaScript) for our market research software products, Q and Displayr, to simplify and automate data cleaning, analysis, visualization, and reporting. Since joining, the company has grown from 20 to 100+ employees and nearly \$14 million in ARR.

  • Setup CircleCI pipelines and an orb for continuous integration and deploying of R packages to Azure blog storage, achieving 5x reduction in build times.

  • Developed novel algorithm for classifying open-ended text survey responses involving Google's Universal Sentence Encoder, clustering, and random forests. Later explored prompt engineering using ChatGPT for this task and compared with our existing algorithm.

  • Maintained/co-authored a suite of $40+$ R packages for statistical modeling, visualization, data cleaning and integrating with various web APIs.

  • Lead a small team of data scientists to write efficient, intuitive tools for performing text analysis, driver analysis, regression, and choice modeling using Scrum.

  • Designed user interface as well as interactive visualization and HTML widget output for data science and machine learning features in our apps, Displayr and Q.

  • Developed models implemented in stan and R for Hierarchical Bayes choice modeling, simulation, and experimental design.

  • Wrote blog posts detailing usage of new features and replied to customer questions.

• Postdoctoral researcher, University of Technology Sydney, 2015-2017

  • Supervisor: Matt P. Wand

• Postdoctoral researcher, Texas A&M University, 2013-2015

  • Supervisor: Raymond J. Carroll

Publications

M. W. McLean and M. P. Wand. “Variational Message Passing for Elaborate Response Regression Models”. In: Bayesian Analysis 14.2 (Jun. 2019), pp. 371-398.

K. Triff, M. W. McLean, E. Callaway, et al. “Dietary fat and fiber interact to uniquely modify global histone post-translational epigenetic programming in a rat colon cancer progression model”. In: International Journal of Cancer 143.6 (May 2018), pp. 1402-1415.

M. W. McLean (2017). “RefManageR: Import and Manage BibTeX and BibLaTeX References in R”. The Journal of Open Source Software. DOI: 10.21105/joss.00338. R Package also accepted by ROpenSci.

K. Triff, M. W. McLean, K. Kranti, et al. “Assessment of Histone Tail Modifications and Transcriptional Profiling During Colon Cancer Progression Reveals a Global Decrease in H3K4me3 Activity”. In: BBA - Molecular Basis of Disease 1863.6 (Jun. 2017), pp. 1392–1402. DOI: 10.1016/j.bbadis.2017.03.009.

M. W. McLean, G. Hooker and D. Ruppert. “Restricted Likelihood Ratio Tests for Linearity in Scalar-on-Function Regression”. In: Statistics and Computing 25.5 (Sep. 2015), pp. 997–1008. DOI: 10.1007/s11222-014-9473-1. arXiv: 1310.5811 [stat.ME].

M. W. McLean, G. Hooker, A. M. Staicu, F. Scheipl and D. Ruppert. “Functional Generalized Additive Models”. In: Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 23.1 (Feb. 2014), pp. 249–269. DOI: 10.1080/10618600.2012.729985.

Matteson, D. S, M. W. McLean, D. B. Woodard and S. G. Henderson. “Forecasting Emergency Medical Service Call Arrival Rates”. In: Annals of Applied Statistics 5.2B (Jun. 2011), pp. 1379–1406. DOI: 10.1214/10-AOAS442. arXiv: 1107.4919 [stat.AP].

Manuscripts

M. W. McLean, C. J. Oates and M. P. Wand. “Real-Time Semiparametric Regression via Sequential Monte Carlo”. (2017). Submitted.

M. W. McLean, F. Scheipl, G. Hooker, S. Greven and D. Ruppert (2017). Bayesian Functional Generalized Additive Models with Sparsely Observed Covariates. arXiv: 1305.3585 [stat.ME].

M. W. McLean (2014). Straightforward Bibliography Management in R Using the RefManageR Package. arXiv: 1403.2036 [cs.DL].

Computing Proficiency

• R (including tidyverse, plotly, rstan, and htmlwidgets), Linux, Emacs/ESS, Git, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, RStudio, python, docker, HTML, JIRA, Scrum, SQL

• Past: SAS, C, Java, MS Office, MATLAB

Certifications

• SAFe Practice Consultant (SPC) (2024)

• SAFe Practice Consultant (RTE) (2024)

• SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (SASM) (2024)

• Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence Based Management (PAL-EBM) (2024)

• Certified Agile Leader (CAL 1) (2024)

• Professional Scrum Master II, 2024

• Professional Scrum Product Owner I, 2024

• Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills I, 2024

• Introduction to Relational Databases (IBM/Coursera), 2024

• Python Project for Data Engineering (IBM/Coursera), 2024

• Python for Data Science, AI \& Development (IBM/Coursera), 2023

• Professional Scrum Master I, 2022

Open-Source Software

• RefManageR an R package available on CRAN, for which I am sole author and maintainer. The package allows for importing, printing, and working with and bibliographic references in R.

• refund an R package available on CRAN for regression with functional data. I have contributed the following components that allow for fitting, prediction, and visualization of functional generalized additive models: fgam(), af(), lf(), predict.fgam(), vis.fgam().

• Online Appendix to "Functional Generalized Additive Models", containing R code used in simulations.

Honors, Awards, & Fellowships

• NSERC PGS-D, 2011-2013

• NSERC PGS-M (CGS-M Declined), 2008-2009

• NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, University of Manitoba, 2007 and 2008

• Dr. Cyril H. Goulden Memorial Scholarship, 2008

• U. of M. Students Union Scholarship, University of Manitoba, 2005, 2006, and 2007

• Queen Elizabeth II Entrance Scholarship, 2004-2005

Publications, talks, and software are available on the other tabs of my webpage.

Academic Experience

Cornell University

• Teaching Assistant, Basic Engineering Probability and Statistics, Summer 2012

• Graduate Research Assistant, David Ruppert, Summer 2011

• Teaching Assistant, Data Mining, Spring 2011

• Teaching Assistant, Basic Engineering Probability and Statistics, Fall 2010

• Graduate Research Assistant, David Ruppert, Summer 2010

• Graduate Research Assistant, David Matteson, Shane Henderson, and Dawn Woodard, 2009-2010

• Teaching Assistant, Basic Engineering Probability and Statistics, Fall 2009

• Teaching Assistant, Introductory Engineering Stochastic Processes I, Spring 2009

• Teaching Assistant, Basic Engineering Probability and Statistics, Fall 2008

University of Manitoba

• Undergraduate Research Assistant, A. Thavaneswaran, Summer 2008

• Undergraduate Research Assistant, Ruppa K. Thulasiram, Summer 2007

Professional Activities

• Referee for Biometrics, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Environmetrics, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Statistica Sinica, Journal of Statistical Software, Statistical Modelling

• Cornell Operations Research Graduate Student Association President, 2011-2012

Talks and Poster Presentations

• Restricted Likelihood Ratio Tests for Regression with Functional Data

  • 2014 WNAR/IMS Conference, Honolulu, HI, June, 2014 (invited)

  • ENAR 2014 Spring Meeting, Baltimore, MD, March, 2014 (contributed)

• Reproducible Research and Dynamic Documents with R

  • IAMCS Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Workshop Series, College Station, TX, 2014 (invited)

• Authoring R packages

  • IAMCS Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Workshop Series, College Station, TX, 2014 (invited)

• Functional Generalized Additive Models

  • Department of Statistics, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, August, 2017 (invited)

  • Annual Conference of the German and Austrian Statistical Association, Vienna, Austria, September, 2012 (invited)

  • ORIE PhD Student Colloquium, September, 2012 (talk)

  • Imaging, Communications and Finance: Stochastic Modeling of Real-world Problems, Columbia University, June, 2011 (poster)

  • SAMSI Closing Workshop on the Analysis of Object Data, SAMSI, Research Triangle Park, June, 2011 (poster)

  • Statistical Methods for Very Large Datasets Conference, Johns Hopkins University, June, 2011 (poster)

  • Joint Statistical Meetings, Vancouver, Canada, August, 2010 (talk)

• SCoOp: Statistical Computation of Option Prices (poster)

  • University of Manitoba