Lester W. Mackey

Lester Mackey is an American computer scientist and statistician. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at Stanford University. Mackey develops machine learning 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.

Early life and education Mackey grew up on Long Island. 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. Mackey was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, 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 Stanford University, 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. Namesake of minor planet 15093 Lestermackey 2006 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship 2007 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award Winner 2007 Moses Taylor Pyne Honor Prize 2009 Second Place in the $1 million Netflix Prize competition for collaborative filtering 2010 Best Student Paper Award, International Conference on Machine Learning 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 Leadership Academy 2022 Outstanding Paper Award, NeurIPS 2023 Ethel Newbold Prize 2023 Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics 2023 MacArthur Fellowship

Selected publications