Rick McFarland is the Chief Data Officer for LexisNexis Legal & Professional (LNLP). He is a data evangelist with a broad background in publishing, digital media, financial services, and management consulting. Rick joined LNLP in February 2017 and is responsible for how the business collects, uses, manages, and shares its data.
Before joining LNLP, Rick was the Chief Data Scientist for the Hearst Corporation where he focused his efforts on centralizing all of Hearst’s enterprise-wide data assets in the cloud and building a world-class Data Science and Machine Learning capability at Hearst to leverage this new “big data” resource throughout the organization.
Prior to Hearst, Rick was with Amazon for 5 years where he led analytics teams in both the global marketing and Kindle departments. These teams were responsible for building and utilizing large-scale data resources focused on customer analytics and marketing effectiveness measurement. Significant contributions included: patenting a process for analyzing customer data from multiple sources while preserving customer anonymity and establishing the Business Intelligence Engineer job family which now includes over 150 employees.
From 1998 to 2008, Rick took on lead analytical roles in the financial services and management consulting industries. He managed data platforms and analytics teams for Bank of America and Washington Mutual Bank. He was a partner with the financial services consulting firm, Novantas, and a Director at Digitas.
Rick is a graduate of the University of Virginia with a PhD in Statistics in 1998, Stanford University in 1992 with a MS in Engineering, and the University of Kansas in 1990 with a BS in Mathematics.