Wes McKinney is an American software developer and businessman. He is the creator and "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL) of the open-source

pandas Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections (PANDAS) is a controversial hypothetical diagnosis for a subset of children with rapid onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or tic disorders. Sy ...

package for data analysis in the

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

programming language, and has also authored three versions of the reference book ''Python for Data Analysis''. He's also the creator of Apache Arrow, a cross-language development platform for in-memory data, an
Ibis
a unified Python dataframe API. He was the CEO and

founder Founder or Founders may refer to: Places *Founders Park, a stadium in South Carolina, formerly known as Carolina Stadium * Founders Park, a waterside park in Islamorada, Florida Arts, entertainment, and media * Founders (''Star Trek''), the ali ...

of technology

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...

Datapad. He was a software engineer at

Two Sigma Investments Two Sigma Investments, LP is an American hedge fund headquartered in New York City. It uses a variety of technological methods, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and distributed computing, for its trading strategies. The fir ...

. He founded Ursa Labs, which, in 2021, became part of Voltron Data. In 2022, it was announced that Voltron Data had raised $110 million.

Early life and education

In 2007, McKinney graduated from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

with a BS in Mathematics. In 2010, McKinney began a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

program in Statistics at

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

. He went on leave a year later to focus on his professional projects.

Career

From 2007 to 2010, McKinney researched global macro and credit trading strategies at

AQR Capital Management AQR Capital Management (short for Applied Quantitative Research) is a global investment management firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, United States. The firm, which was founded in 1998 by Cliff Asness, David Kabiller, John Liew, and Robert Kra ...

. During his time at AQR Capital, he learned Python and started building what would become

. McKinney made the pandas project public in 2009. McKinney left AQR in 2010 to start a PhD in Statistics at

. He went on leave from Duke in the summer of 2011 to devote more time to developing Pandas, culminating in the writing of ''Python for Data Analysis'' in 2012. In 2012, he co-founded Lambda Foundry Inc. McKinney co-founded Datapad with Chang She in January 2013, with McKinney as CEO. Datapad developed a data visualization product also on the Python stack targeting enterprise customers. Datapad was acquired by Cloudera in September 2014. McKinney joined the engineering team at

Cloudera Cloudera, Inc. is an American data lake software company. History Cloudera, Inc. was formed on June 27, 2008 in Burlingame, California by Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah, Jeff Hammerbacher, and chief executive Mike Olson. Prior to Cloude ...

following the acquisition. He worked on an open-source project called Ibis, incubated within Cloudera Labs, aiming at using Python for

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

problems. In 2016, McKinney joined the investment fund

to work on Apache Arrow. In 2018, he launched Ursa Labs. In 2023, he joined Posit (formerly RStudio) as a Principal Architect.

Media coverage

McKinney has been interviewed by

VentureBeat ''VentureBeat'' is an American technology website headquartered in San Francisco, California. ''VentureBeat'' is a tech news source that publishes news, analysis, long-form features, interviews, and videos. The ''VentureBeat'' company was fou ...

and others. He frequently gives talks to the Python community.

References

External links

Personal website

Book discussion on YCombinator

Ibis project blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:McKinney, Wes Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) American statisticians Python (programming language) people American computer programmers Free software programmers American data scientists American chief executives