Paul D. McNicholas is an Irish-Canadian statistician. He is a professor and University Scholar in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University.^[2] In 2015, McNicholas was awarded the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics.^[3] McNicholas uses computational statistics techniques, and mixture models in particular, to gain insight into large and complex datasets.^[4] He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Classification.^[5]

McNicholas attended Trinity College Dublin where in 2004 he received a B.A. (Mod.) in Mathematics. He also holds an M.Sc. in High Performance Computing and a Ph.D. in Statistics.^[6] His 2007 Ph.D. thesis is entitled Topics in Unsupervised Learning.^[7]

McNicholas started his faculty career at University of Guelph in 2007. In 2014, he joined McMaster University.^[6] He has authored more than 100 scientific works cited over 4000 times.^[8] The majority of his research has been on model-based clustering, specifically in developing novel finite mixture models for clustering and classification of multivariate data. He has published works on clustering high-dimensional data and the use of non-Gaussian mixtures.^[9] McNicholas has published two monographs: Mixture Model-Based Classification^[10] and Data Science with Julia.^[11]

In 2017, he was inducted into the College of New Scholars Artists and Scientists of the college of the Royal Society of Canada.^[12][13] In 2019, he was awarded an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.^[4][14]