Patrick R. Johnstone

I'm a Machine Learning Engineer at Meta. I work on a team using causal machine learning to improve and personalize ad load for the FBapp. 

From 2020 to 2023, I was a Research Scientist in the Machine Learning group of the Computational Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Laboratory. 

From 2017 to 2020, I was a Post Doctoral Associate and part-time lecturer in the department of Management Science and Information Systems (MSIS) at Rutgers Business School, working with Jonathan Eckstein .       

Education 

I graduated in May 2017 with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). At UIUC, I was in the Beckman Institute and the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory (CSL) working with Prof. Pierre Moulin. I also received my Master of Science degree in ECE from UIUC. I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. At UNSW I graduated with the University Medal (No. 1 student in Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering).

I have interned at Qualcomm Research, Rambus, and CSIRO. 

Research Interests

• First-order optimization  algorithms, especially proximal operator splitting methods 

• Parallel, asynchronous, and distributed methods 

• Algorithms for ML and data science

See a longer summary on my Research interests page.

Teaching

• Business Decision Analytics under Uncertainty, Fall 2019, lecture notes

Thanks for visiting! See my publications, google scholar, and github . Feel free to send me an email at patrick.r.johnstone@gmail.com.