KO: What is your name, job title, and how long have you been using R? JS: My name is Julia Silge and I’m a data scientist at Stack Overflow. I have been working in R for less than three years. KO: Wow! What were you all about before that?

KO: What is your name, job title, and how long have you been using R? NR: I’m Noam Ross, I’m a Senior Research Scientist at EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit that works at the intersection of conservation and health. I’ve done work in R for about 8 years, which is essentially from the start of graduate school (five years) and three years of work. KO: Did you love it [R] immediately? NR: No! And I’m mixed on whether I love it now.

[This interview occurred at the 2017 rOpenSci unconference] SK: I’m Sean Kross, I’m the CTO of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab. Today I’m interviewing Julia Stewart Lowndes. Julia, what is your current preferred job title? JSL: I’m calling myself a marine data scientist - I’m the Science Program Lead for the Ocean Health Index.

[This interview occurred at the 2017 rOpenSci unconference] KO: What is your name, job title, and how long have you been using R? KR: My name is Karthik Ram I’m a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. I’m an ecologist by training but have been working in the ‘data science’ space for 15 years. My real introduction to R was during my PhD when I was a teaching assistant for an engineering class on data analysis.

KO: What is your name, your title, and how many years have you worked in R? JB: I’m Jenny Bryan, I am a software engineer at RStudio (still getting used to that title)., And I am on leave from being an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. I’ve been working with R or it’s predecessors since 1996. I switched to R from S in the early 2000s.

KO: What is your name, job title, and how long have you been using R? [Note: This interview took place in May 2017. Mara joined RStudio as their tidyverse developer advocate in November 2017.] MA: My name is Mara Averick, I do consulting, data science, I just say “data nerd at large” because I’ve seen those Venn diagrams and I’m definitely not a data scientist. I used R in high school for fantasy basketball.

KO: What is your name, job title, and how long have you been using R? DS: My name is David Smith. I work at Microsoft and my self-imposed title is ‘R Community Lead’. I’ve been working with R specifically for about 10 years, but I’d been working with S since the early 90s. KO: How did you transition into using R? DS: I was using S for a long, long time, and I worked for the company that commercialized S, where I was a project manager for S-PLUS.