Lester Mackey is an American computer scientist and statistician. He is a principal researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

and an adjunct professor at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. Mackey develops

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

methods, models, and theory for large-scale learning tasks driven by applications from climate forecasting, healthcare, and the social good. He was named a 2023

MacArthur Fellow The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and 30 individuals workin ...

Early life and education

Mackey grew up on

Long Island Long Island is a densely populated continental island in southeastern New York (state), New York state, extending into the Atlantic Ocean. It constitutes a significant share of the New York metropolitan area in both population and land are ...

. He has said that, as a teenager, the Ross Mathematics Program in number theory introduced him to proof-based mathematics, where he learned about induction and rigorous proof. He got his first taste of academic research at the

Research Science Institute The Research Science Institute (RSI) is an international summer research program for high school students. RSI is sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE) and hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, ...

. He joined

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

as an undergraduate student, where he earned his BSE in Computer Science. There he conducted research with

Maria Klawe Maria Margaret Klawe ( ; born 1951) is a Canadian-American computer scientist and served as the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College from 2006 to 2023. Born in Toronto in 1951, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2009. She was previously ...

and David Walker. Mackey was a graduate student at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, where he earned a PhD in Computer Science (2012) and an MA in Statistics (2011). At Berkeley, his dissertation, advised by Michael I. Jordan, included work on sparse principal components analysis (PCA) for gene expression modeling, low-rank matrix completion for recommender systems, robust matrix factorization for video surveillance, and concentration inequalities for matrices. After Berkeley, he joined

, first as a postdoctoral fellow working with Emmanuel Candès and then as an assistant professor of statistics and, by courtesy, computer science. At Stanford, he created the Statistics for Social Good working group.

Research and career

In 2016, Mackey joined

as a researcher and was appointed as an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He was made a principal researcher in 2019. Mackey's early work developed a method to predict progression rates of people with

ALS Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease (MND) or—in the United States—Lou Gehrig's disease (LGD), is a rare, terminal neurodegenerative disorder that results in the progressive loss of both upper and low ...

. He used the PRO-ACT database of clinical trial data and

Bayesian inference Bayesian inference ( or ) is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to calculate a probability of a hypothesis, given prior evidence, and update it as more information becomes available. Fundamentally, Bayesian infer ...

to predict disease prognosis. He has also developed machine learning models for subseasonal climate and weather forecasting, to more accurately predict temperature and precipitation 2-6 weeks in advance. His models outperform the operational, physics-based dynamical models used by the

United States Bureau of Reclamation The Bureau of Reclamation, formerly the United States Reclamation Service, is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees water resource management, specifically as it applies to the oversight and operatio ...

Awards and honors

* 2003

Intel Science Talent Search The Regeneron Science Talent Search, known for its first 57 years as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and then as the Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS) from 1998 through 2016, is a research-based science fair, science competition in ...

6th Place * Namesake of minor planet 15093 Lestermackey * 2006

Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation was established by the United States Congress in 1986 in honor of former United States Senator and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater Barry Morris Goldwater ...

* 2007 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award Winner * 2007 Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize * 2009 Second Place in the $1 million

Netflix Prize The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users being identified ...

competition for collaborative filtering * 2010 Best Student Paper Award,

International Conference on Machine Learning The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is a leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificial ...

* 2012 First Place in the ALS Prediction Prize4Life Challenge for predicting Lou Gehrig's disease progression * 2019 Winner of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Subseasonal Climate Forecast Rodeo * 2022 Elected to the

Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) comprises the presidents, past presidents and presidents-elect of the following, primarily Northern American, professional societies of statisticians: * American Statistical Association * ...

Leadership Academy * 2022 Outstanding Paper Award, NeurIPS * 2023 Ethel Newbold Prize * 2023 Elected Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts ...

* 2023

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and ...

* 2024 Elected

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The designation of ASA Fellow has been a sign ...

Selected publications

* * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mackey, Lester Living people Year of birth missing (living people) People from Long Island Princeton University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Microsoft employees MacArthur Fellows Statisticians American statisticians African-American statisticians Computer scientists American computer scientists African-American computer scientists Stanford University Department of Statistics faculty Fellows of the American Statistical Association