Professional Bio

Cory McCartan is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Penn State.

He earned his Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University in 2023, and a B.A. in math from Grinnell College in 2019.  He worked as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University for a year before joining Penn State in 2024.

McCartan works on methodological and applied problems in social sciences, with particular emphasis on Bayesian and computational methods and spatial or geographic data. Much of his research has developed or applied algorithmic tools to the problem of legislative redistricting; he helped start the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project at Harvard in 2021. He also develops and maintains a number of open-source R packages for redistricting, statistical analysis, and visualization.