GEORGE ALEXANDER McCARTHY
georgeamccarthy@outlook.com


EDUCATION

2026-now   PhD AI, University of Cambridge × University of Manchester
           Self-Driving Laboratories: Autonomous Agentic AI for Discovery
           in Big Science
           Supervisors: Dr Boris Bolliet, Prof Anna Scaife, Dr Miles Cranmer

2018-2022  MPhys Physics with Astrophysics, University of Bath
           First-class honours


EMPLOYMENT

2026       Data Scientist, The Guardian, King's Cross, London (6-month contract)
           - Built an article classifier to increase advertising revenue and
             ran a controlled human-annotated study
           - Optimised paper copy distribution with an uncensored demand
             estimation model

2023-2025  Engineer, Altus Ventures, Soho, London
           - Automated human business workflows with highly scalable
             distributed systems on AWS
           - Early hire in a lean, high-ownership start-up
           - Led an agentic restaurant recommendation system (AWS, LLMs, RAG)
           - Built trading and forecasting tools for £100M+ yearly sales
             (Python, SQL)
           - Pitched, designed and co-built a company developing an 8M-node
             graph analysis product
           - Co-authored grant applications securing £200k+ in funding

2021       ML Intern, Jina AI, Berlin
           - Neural search engine for proteins using ProtBert embeddings
             github.com/georgeamccarthy/protein_search


RESEARCH

2026       Research fellowship, University of Utah (1 month)
           - Modelled the reverse shock of GRB 220101A

2021-2025  Gamma-ray burst physics, University of Bath / University of Utah
           - New analytical Klein-Nishina inverse-Compton afterglow model
           - First-author ApJ paper; open-source library
             github.com/georgeamccarthy/ykn
           - Visiting researcher, University of Utah

2021-2022  Sea ice acoustics (MPhys project), University of Bath
           - Fourier analysis of multi-year underwater acoustic data
           - Classified acoustic transients with pre-trained deep models

2021       Microlensing exoplanets, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
           - Simulated millions of light curves; trained a classifier

2020       Gamma-ray burst physics, RAS summer intern, University of Bath
           - Electron cooling results in an MCMC fitting code (ALMA, Swift)


PUBLICATIONS

2026  McCarthy & Laskar. The Structured Jet Reverse Shock of GRB 220101A.
      In prep.
2024  McCarthy & Laskar. Klein-Nishina Corrections to the Spectra and
      Light Curves of Gamma-ray Burst Afterglows. ApJ 970, 135.
      https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad4e37
2022  Blondel et al. incl. McCarthy. Acoustic properties of Arctic sea ice.
      ICUA-2022.
      https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/acoustic-properties-of-arctic-sea-ice-from-year-long-underwater-m
2022  Blondel et al. incl. McCarthy. Seasonal variations in underwater
      acoustic properties of sea ice. UK Arctic Science Conference.
      https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/seasonal-variations-in-underwater-acoustic-properties-of-sea-ice-

TEACHING

2021       Assistant Teacher, computational physics (C++), University of Bath


OTHER

Mentoring  Peer mentor to first-years (2021); mentored an intern (2024)
Roles      Chairman, Bath University Ultimate Frisbee (125 members)
Interests  Wrestling, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Ultimate Frisbee, travel