Tyler McCandless earned three degrees in Meteorology from Penn State University: PhD - 2015, MS - 2010 and BS - 2010.  While at Penn State, Tyler was a member of the Cross Country and Track and Field Varsity teams.  Highlights in his athletic career were being the co-captain of the cross country team and helping lead the team to a 25^th place finish at the NCAA Championships and earning an individual NCAA D1 All-American Honors in the 10,000m.  After completing his NCAA eligibility, Tyler moved to Boulder Colorado to pursue his athletic and academic careers.  While at the National Center for Atmospheric Research as a graduate research assistant, Tyler completed his dissertation, “Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Solar Power Prediction.” In the dissertation research, Tyler developed an innovative approach to combine unsupervised learning with supervised learning to build a regime-dependent artificial intelligence forecasting methodology for solar power. After earning his doctorate, Tyler worked in the private sector until May 2018, with his previous position as Manager of Services at Ascend Analytics, which is an energy risk modeling software company in Boulder, Colorado. In May 2018, Tyler returned to NCAR as a Machine Learning Scientist and is responsible for providing high level machine learning expertise to various projects in the Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) at NCAR. Current projects include using machine learning techniques to improve wind and solar power prediction, integrating solar power and battery storage systems, building an algorithm to improve wildfire prediction and implementing machine learning models as parameterizations in NWP modeling.

 Tyler married his wife Kristin in Estes Park, CO in December 2016, and they had their first child, Levi, in July 2019.  He is also a professional distance runner who has competed in two Olympic Marathon Trials and qualified for a third with his 2:12:28 marathon to finish 2nd at the USA Marathon Championships in December 2017.