Max Kuhn
Software Engineer at RStudio, Inc.
Connecticut, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMax Kuhn is a software engineer and Ph.D. biostatistician with 19 years of experience building statistical and machine learning tools for pharma, diagnostics, and data science platforms. Currently at RStudio, he develops modeling and visualization software and has a long track record of producing and maintaining R packages and scalable statistical computing—including notable contributions to the widely used caret and tidymodels ecosystems. He has led teams of up to a dozen people across drug discovery, assay development, and manufacturing analytics, and is comfortable switching between individual contributor work and technical leadership. Max prefers creative, complex problems where order must be brought to noisy, high-dimensional data, and he emphasizes staying focused on core objectives when data volume tempts distraction. His background in predictive modeling, computational biology/chemistry, and experiment design is complemented by hands-on software architecture and refactoring experience (e.g., in the R keras interface), making him effective at translating rigorous statistics into production-ready tools.
19 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Biostatistics, Ph.D., Biostatistics at Virginia Commonwealth University School of MedicineB.S., Mathematics, B.S., Mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University
Github Skills (19)
develop10
r10
technical-writing10
machine-learning10
recipe10
feature-engineering10
data-preprocessing10
model-building10
keras10
ensembles10
statistical-models10
bookdown10
documentation10
data-analysis9
api-design8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
topepo/caret
May 2014 - Aug 2022
caret (Classification And Regression Training) R package that contains misc functions for training and plotting classification and regression models
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:4 releases, 1418 commits, 262 PRs in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Max's commits primarily focused on modifying and expanding the functionality of the caret package, specifically concerning the inclusion and customization of machine learning models. Their contributions involved adding features for probability predictions, incorporating new models (e.g., multi-step adaptive MCP-Net, random forest rule-based models), and addressing specific bugs in existing model implementations to improve accuracy and usability. Further, the user's work involved expanding the capabilities of the resampling functionalities.
classificationrr-packageregression-models
tidymodels/recipes
Dec 2016 - Jan 2023
Pipeable steps for feature engineering and data preprocessing to prepare for modeling
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:21 releases, 119 reviews, 1038 commits in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Max contributed to the recipes project by adding new date and holiday step functions for feature engineering and data preprocessing. These functions added the capability to generate date-based factors for various issue numbers, extending the project's utility for handling temporal data and time series analysis. The user also added a new section for "Other Steps Related to Dummy Variables" to one of the vignettes.
data-preprocessingfeature-engineering
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