Creator of pandas and Data Analysis Pioneer
Wes McKinney is an American software developer and businessman. He is the creator of the open-source pandas library for data analysis in Python and has authored multiple editions of Python for Data Analysis. McKinney also developed Apache Arrow, a cross-language development platform for in-memory data, and Ibis, a unified Python dataframe API.
He has held roles including CEO of Datapad, founder of Ursa Labs, and Principal Architect at Posit (formerly RStudio).
McKinney graduated from MIT in 2007 with a BS in Mathematics. He began a PhD program in Statistics at Duke University in 2010 but took a leave of absence in 2011 to focus on his professional projects.
McKinney worked at AQR Capital Management from 2007 to 2010, where he learned Python and started building what would become pandas. He made the pandas project public in 2009. After leaving Duke University in 2011, he authored Python for Data Analysis and co-founded Lambda Foundry and Datapad. Datapad was acquired by Cloudera in 2014, where he contributed to the Ibis project.
In 2016, McKinney joined Two Sigma Investments to work on Apache Arrow, and in 2018, he launched Ursa Labs, which later became part of Voltron Data. In 2023, he joined Posit as a Principal Architect.
McKinney has been featured in interviews with VentureBeat and other outlets. He frequently delivers talks to the Python community, sharing insights on data analysis and open-source development.