Guests of The R-Podcast

One of the driving forces behind the popularity of R for data science is the community of users and developers sharing their knowledge and contributing back to the R ecosystem. One of the goals of the R-Podcast is to showcase innovative developments and analyses by bringing members of the R community on the show to discuss their efforts. Below is a list of guests who have appeared on at least one episode of the podcast. If you would like to be on the R-Podcast, please visit the contact page for the various ways of getting in touch with the show.

Heather Turner

Heather Turner

Heather is a Research Software Engineering Fellow in the Statistics Department at the University of Warwick. She has previously worked as a statistician for Pfizer and as a freelance statistical programming consultant. She has been an R user since 2001 and has co-authored several CRAN packages, notably the statistical modelling packages gnm, BradleyTerry2 and PlackettLuce. Heather is on the board of the R Foundation and chairs the Forwards taskforce for underrepresented groups in the R community. She is also on the organizing teams of Warwick R User Group and R-Ladies Remote.

Hilary Parker

Hilary Parker

Hilary Parker is a data scientist at StitchFix as well as co-host of the excellent Not So Standard Deviations podcast. She is an R and statistics enthusiast determined to bring rigor to analysis wherever she goes. At Stitch Fix she works on teasing apart correlation from causation, with a strong dose of reproducibility. Formerly a Senior Data Analyst at Etsy, she received a PhD in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Ian Lyttle

Ian Lyttle

Ian Lyttle is a data scientist at Schneider Electric. His background is mechanical engineering, with an emphasis on computational fluid-dynamics. He started using R in 2011 and quickly became an enthusiast for what is now the Tidyverse. He is the author of packages vembedr, bsplus, and ghentr, as well as a contributor to Tidyverse, R-Lib, and other packages and projects. He also participates with the Graphics Working Group at the Iowa State University Department of Statistics. He finds that the sense of community fostered within the Iowa State group, as well as within R groups worldwide, adds tremendously to his professional life.

Javier Luraschi

Javier Luraschi

Javier is a software engineer at RStudio with experience in technologies ranging from desktop, web, mobile and backend; to augmented reality and deep learning applications. He previously worked for Microsoft Research and SAP and holds a double degree in Mathematics and Software. He is author and maintainer of the sparklyr R package which provides an interface to the powerful Apache Spark platform."

Jeff Allen

Jeff Allen

Jeff Allen is a software engineer at RStudio. Jeff’s background is in Computer Science and bioinformatics; it was there that he first encountered R in 2007. After spending many years as an RStudio user and evangelist, he joined the team in 2013. On top of his work with Shiny Server and RStudio Connect, Jeff also maintains a few R packages such as plumbr and shinyStore.

JJ Allaire

JJ Allaire

JJ Allaire is a software engineer and founder of RStudio. Before forming RStudio, JJ created a wide variety of products including ColdFusion, Open Live Writer, and Lost it!. On top of his work with the RStudio IDE, JJ contributes to several R packages including rmarkdown, rticles, reticulate, and bookdown.

Joe Cheng

Joe Cheng

Joe Cheng is the CTO of RStudio. Joe is a software engineer who has worked at a number of startups including Allaire, Upromise, and Onfolio. He also worked on Windows Live Writer. Joe was the creatore of the RStudio IDE along with JJ Allaire as well as the creator of the shiny R package for creating interactive web applications with R.

Kanishka Misra

Kanishka Misra

Kanishka Misra is a PhD student at Purdue University studying Natural Language Understanding. He enjoys learning new ways of applying his knowledge of natrual language processing and machine learnign to solve social science problems in a data-driven way. At the 2019 Chicago R Unconference, Kanishka created a brand new R package called footrulr which compare sentences using Machine Translation and Text Summarization evaluation metrics.

Kevin Ushey

Kevin Ushey

I am a software engineer at RStudio, and previously worked as as a statistical programmer at the rglab within the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. I am a tool builder – I enjoy developing computational tools that help researchers and scientists to achieve their analytic goals.

I completed an MSc in Statistics at the University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Jenny Bryan. My thesis (PDF) involved the study of gene-gene and gene-Rx interaction effects, and statistical assessment of these epistatic effects in yeast growth curves.