Patrick Mcdonald
Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lafayette, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Mcdonald is a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with nine years of experience specializing in cosmology, large-scale structure, and precision data analysis. He combines deep theoretical physics training (PhD from UPenn) with hands-on code development in C/C++, Python, and Julia to design optimal survey forecasts, high-precision spatial correlation algorithms, and fast numerical simulations. Patrick led Fisher-matrix driven optimization for the ~$100M DESI survey, built mock-data generators and emulators, and applied renormalization-group techniques to integrate over latent variables—bringing uncommon theoretical tools to practical data challenges. He also leverages modern ML stacks (JAX/Optax) and symbolic systems to accelerate inference and has improved simulation time-stepping by an order of magnitude, reflecting a knack for marrying analytic insight with computational engineering. Based in Lafayette, CA, he advises collaborators on surrogate modeling and statistical rigor, ensuring imperfect observations still yield robust constraints on fundamental physics.
9 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Physics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Physics at Case Western Reserve UniversityPhD, Physics and Astronomy, PhD, Physics and Astronomy at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (7)
orbital-mechanics6
astrodynamics5
cosmology5
simulations5
astrophysics3
python1
forecast1
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
adematti/cosmopipe
Jul 2021 - Oct 2021
Contributions:27 commits, 20 pushes, 5 comments in 3 months
pmcdonal/Test
Jul 2016 - Jul 2016
Contributions:5 pushes, 1 branch in 1 day
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