About

Grew out of a need to analyze large-scale data

About the project lead

The project lead, Henrik Bengtsson, has a MSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics. He is an associate professor at the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and affiliated with the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Henrik is one of forty members of the R Foundation - a non-profit organization that supports the R Project, its continued development of the R language, and the R community around it. Through this work, he is also a member, chair, and the director of the R Consortium Infrastructure Software Committee (ISC), which supports research & development activities related to R through a grant program with financial support from leading industry investors.

He has developed small and large-scale scientific software for 25 years within areas of statistics, bioinformatics, genomics, cancer research, and computational sciences. These tools have been developed as part of real-world collaborative research projects going from scientific question, to statistical models and estimators, and implementation and validation. It is throughout the computational needs of these small and large-scale projects that the seed to what would become the future ecosystem sprung out.

Henrik has worked with R since 2000 and has contributed with many R packages on CRAN and Bioconductor. With more than 30 CRAN packages, he is among the top-10 maintainers there. Several of his packages are among the top-1% most downloaded on CRAN. He has also developed and contributed to several Bioconductor packages. He has also contributed with design and implementation to the R core distribution.

Open access, open source, cross-platform operability, long-term stability, correctness, and reproducibility are absolute top priorities throughout all his software projects.