Michael Macaskill
Senior Biostatistician
Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Macaskill is a Senior Biostatistician based in Christchurch, New Zealand, with 14 years of applied experience and a research career spanning decades that bridges population health, neuroscience, and defence. He holds a PhD from the University of Otago and has led teams at Stats NZ managing population estimates and projections, directed research at the New Zealand Brain Research Institute, and now advises cancer control strategy at Te Aho o Te Kahu. Comfortable moving between high-level policy and hands-on data work, he brings deep statistical rigour to public health decision-making and modelling. An active contributor to open-source science tooling, he’s improved data export and task-handling in the widely used PsychoPy experiment platform—an indication of his practical focus on reproducible, R-friendly outputs.
14 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Medicine, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Medicine at University of OtagoBSc, BA (Hons), PSYCHOLOGY, BSc, BA (Hons), PSYCHOLOGY at University of Canterbury
Stackoverflow
2,411reputation
71kreached
119answers
6questions
Github Skills (17)
python10
fileio10
file-handling10
file-processing10
experiment10
data-handling10
file-access10
psych8
neuroscience7
psychology7
psychopy6
audio6
max6
eye-tracking6
oop6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
psychopy/psychopy
Jul 2011 - Apr 2022
For running psychology and neuroscience experiments
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:52 commits, 33 PRs, 1 push in 10 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on improving the data handling and output functionalities within the PsychoPy library. Their contributions include fixing a bug in the `saveAsText` function, adding a new `saveAsWideText` function for creating R-friendly text files, and enhancing the `TrialHandler` class with features for n-back tasks. They also addressed issues related to Unicode encoding in data output functions and corrected documentation typos.
neurosciencepythonexperiment-controlcognitive-scienceopenscience
nzbri/msnz
Jun 2021 - May 2023
Functions for working with NZBRI MS epidemiology data
Contributions:1 review, 2 PRs, 22 pushes in 1 year 10 months
epidemiology
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