Paul X. McCarthy is a Sydney-based data scientist, research leader and company director. He is CEO and co-founder of League of Scholars, Adjunct Professor in Computer Science at UNSW Sydney, and cofounding collaborator with the Science of Startups Initiative at the University of Oxford.

His work uses web, text and firm-level data to measure innovation and the economy for governments and institutions including the OECD, the United Nations and Nature. He has presented this work to ambassadors at the OECD in Paris, including a keynote at the OECD Ambassadors Forum.

His research on founder personality and startup success, published in Scientific Reports, has been downloaded more than 130,000 times and covered by The Economist, The Times and Fast Company. Other work has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scientific Data and at the ACM Web Science Conference.

Paul is co-founder of Black Belt Global Venture Studio in Tokyo, backed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which applies this research to find and build high-growth firms in Japan.

Earlier he chaired The Studio at the Sydney Startup Hub, was Director of Strategy and Innovation at SIRCA, and held senior roles with the NSW Government, CSIRO's Data61 and IBM. He is a Senior Advisor to The Leadership Lab at Russell Reynolds Associates, an Industry Fellow at the UTS Data Science Institute and an Honorary Fellow at Western Sydney University.

He is the author of Online Gravity (Simon & Schuster) and writes for Forbes, The Conversation and the Australian Financial Review.

Paul is open to non-executive director and senior advisory roles where data, technology and research strategy matter.