John Frederick MacGregor (b. 1943 in Ontario, Canada) is a statistician whose work in the field of statistical process control has received significant recognition. His pioneering work was in the area of latent variable methods (principal components analysis and partial least squares) applied to industrial processes.
Among his contributions are:
He received his PhD degree in Statistics, and his M.S. degrees in both Statistics and in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his Bachelor of Engineering degree from McMaster University in Canada. At Wisconsin, he worked under the statistician George EP Box.
MacGregor is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and has received many awards for his work in applied statistics and chemometrics, among them, the prestigious Shewhart Medal and the W.G. Hunter Award from the American Society for Quality, and the Herman Wold Medal from the Swedish Chemical Society.
He currently holds the title of “University Professor” (the highest honor awarded to faculty at McMaster University) as well as the Dofasco Chair in Process Automation and Information Technology at McMaster University. He is a cofounder of the McMaster Advanced Control Consortium that is sponsored by many international companies.