We’re very pleased to be introducing someone who needs no introduction in the R community.

[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.

We are pleased to welcome our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Dan Sholler. Dan is an expert in qualitative research (yes, you read that correctly) and studies digital infrastructure creation, growth, and maintenance efforts. Through this research interest, he was drawn to the open science community and its ongoing development of tools and communities to support sustainable, reproducible, high-quality research.

rOpenSci’s overarching mission is to promote a culture of transparent, open, and reproducible research across various scientific communities. All of our activities are geared towards lowering barriers to participation, and building a community of practitioners around the world.