Professor Paul X. McCarthy is a computational social scientist and technology strategist based in Sydney. He specialises in the use of data science to map the global digital economy and decode the hidden patterns of innovation.

McCarthy co-founded the Science of Startups Initiative at the University of Oxford where he led a lab focused on the evidence-based analysis of startup success. His breakthrough three-year global study on the personality traits of founders was published in Nature’s Scientific Reports and recently featured in The Economist. The research has been downloaded over 100,000 times and challenges conventional wisdom about what drives high-growth firms. He has led over a dozen major global research projects with findings published in top journals including Nature’s Scientific Data and the ACM WebScience conference.

As an entrepreneur, he serves as the CEO of League of Scholars. This specialised data consultancy collaborates with governments and global publishers to map the technology landscape. McCarthy was also recently invited as a Partner at the Black Belt Venture Studio. This initiative is backed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and aims to uncover a new generation of unicorns and globally successful high-growth firms in Japan. Previously he co-founded innovative enterprises for IBM, the NSW Government and CSIRO, the Australian national science agency.

He is the author of the bestselling book Online Gravity (Simon & Schuster: London, New York, Sydney) which explains how the digital economy is rewriting the rules of business. His analysis frequently appears in Forbes, The Conversation and the Australian Financial Review. He currently holds academic positions as an Adjunct Professor at UNSW Australia, an Industry Fellow at the Data Science Institute at UTS and an Honorary Fellow at Western Sydney University.