ProfPaul McCarthy

Paul X. McCarthy is a data science leader, entrepreneur and author with more than 25 years of experience across business, technology and research. He is CEO and co-founder of League of Scholars, a research analytics company whose clients include the OECD, the United Nations, Nature and Australian government departments. He is also a co-founder of the Science of Startups initiative at the University of Oxford and of Black Belt Global Venture Studio in Tokyo, which applies startup research to the design of founding teams. He is an Industry Fellow at the UTS Data Science Institute and an Adjunct Professor in Computer Science at UNSW Sydney.

His research builds large-scale evidence about how innovation works. A study of 21,187 startups, published in Scientific Reports, showed how the personality composition of founding teams predicts venture success. Cosmos, a model covering more than 23,000 emerging technologies, was published in Scientific Data and is used by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to map critical technologies. His current work develops new measures of research translation, identifying the published science most likely to reach industry.

His bestselling book Online Gravity (Simon & Schuster) explains how technology is rebooting economics worldwide. He writes for The Conversation, the Australian Financial Review and Forbes, and produces RESEARCH magazine with The Australian, an annual ranking of the country's leading researchers.

McCarthy was previously non-executive chairman of The Studio, a media technology hub in Sydney, and an adviser to Data61 at CSIRO. He has co-founded ventures for IBM, the NSW Government and SIRCA, which built the world's first financial markets tick archive, still used by banks, hedge funds and regulators worldwide.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Graduate Diploma in Arts (Fine Arts) from the University of Sydney, where he won the Ian Langham Memorial Prize in History and Philosophy of Science; a Master of Design in Digital Media from Western Sydney University; and an MBA from Macquarie University, where he won the MGSM Award for Advertising and Marketing.