Paul David McNicholas

Timeline

1. 2004–2007

   Trinity College Dublin degrees

   Born in Cork and raised in Dublin, he studies mathematics, high-performance computing and statistics at Trinity College Dublin. He receives a B.A. (Mod.) in Mathematics in 2004, and his 2007 PhD thesis is titled Topics in Unsupervised Learning.

2. 2007–2014

   Faculty at Guelph and McMaster

   He starts his faculty career at the University of Guelph in 2007 and joins McMaster University in 2014 as a professor of mathematics and statistics. Along the way, he receives Ontario's Early Researcher Award in 2011 and the International Federation of Classification Societies' Chikio Hayashi Award in 2013.

3. 2015

   A Canada Research Chair

   McMaster's Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics goes to him in 2015. His research centres on finite mixture models for clustering and classification of multivariate data, including high-dimensional data and non-Gaussian mixtures.

4. 2016–2019

   Two data science monographs

   In 2016, he publishes the monograph Mixture Model-Based Classification with Chapman & Hall/CRC Press. In 2019, he and P.A. Tait publish a second monograph with the same publisher, Data Science with Julia.

5. 2017–2022

   Directing the MacData Institute

   He directs McMaster's MacData Institute from 2017 to 2022, a hub that fosters collaboration among the university's institutes, centres and researchers who work with data. Using statistics and machine learning, he works with Stelios Georgiades of the McMaster Autism Research Team to identify turning points in the developmental trajectories of children with autism. He is also Associate Chair (Statistics) from 2021 to 2023.

6. 2019–2021

   Steacie and Synge honours

   He receives an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 2019 and the Steacie Prize for the Natural Sciences in 2020, the first time the prize goes to research in statistics. His group develops computationally intensive statistical approaches for detecting previously unknown groups in big or complex data. In 2021, the Royal Society of Canada gives him the John L. Synge Award for outstanding research in the mathematical sciences.

7. 2023–2026

   Killam and Royal Society honours

   He holds a Dorothy Killam Fellowship for 2023–2025. In 2026, he is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for clustering research with mixture models that covers high-dimensional data, data with asymmetric clusters, higher-order data and multivariate longitudinal data.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor and journal editor

   He is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster, holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Classification. He is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and his group works on mixture model-based clustering for higher-order data, mixed-type data and multivariate longitudinal data.