A Winding (Career) Path is the Best Kind: The Many Exciting Problems You Can Solve with a Degree in Physics

Dr. Dave Rench McCauley (QS-2) is a Lead Data Scientist, running projects and teams related to bibliometrics, network science, and graph machine learning. Previously he was a data scientist and solutions architect at a GPU-accelerated database and analytics startup called Kinetica and, prior to that, a technical adviser and development team lead contractor at the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office. Throughout his career, Dave has led or contributed to projects across a diverse array of technologies and disciplines, including semiconductor spintronics, solar panel reliability engineering, renewable energy workforce development, the behavioral science of energy technology adoption, and open source/open science projects in machine learning and FAIR data access. This has led him to managing more than $60 million worth of research projects and pioneering the use of new technologies across the federal government, non-profit, and academic sectors.