In this episode, I’m joined by Will Landau, a statistician and software developer currently working with Eli Lilly and Company. Will specializes in Bayesian methods, high-performance computing, and reproducible workflows. He is the creator of the {targets} R package, a pipeline tool for reproducible computation in statistics and data science. The package became part of ROpenSci in early 2021. Will talks about his journey into R and using it for open source projects. He gives a detailed...

In this episode, I talk with Ahmadou Dicko, a statistician based in Senegal working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Ahmadou shares insights on utilizing data-driven approaches to address development obstacles, especially within humanitarian settings. He explores the innovative packages and strategies developed by his team using R for data management, analysis, and communication. Among these innovations is robotoolbox, an extensive R package designed for...

In this episode, I speak with Chris Knox, who is currently the Head of Data Journalism at the New Zealand Herald. Prior to that, he worked at the New Zealand ministry of health, where he led an analytics team focused on New Zealand's COVID response. During our conversation, Chris highlights why he considers R as the optimal tool for data analysis and reporting, especially when dealing with frequently changing data sources and parameters. He also emphasizes the benefits of using R in a...

In this episode, Travis Gerke and Garrick Aden-Buie join me to demystify the process behind developing custom packages in R. Travis is the Director of Data Science at The Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium (PCCTC), and Garrick is a Data Science Educator and R developer at R Studio.  During the discussion, Travis and Garrick highlight the numerous benefits of having a custom package, including making it easier to access data, automation & documentation of functions, and enhanced...

In this episode, I speak with Kyle Walker, Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Urban Studies at Texas Christian University. Kyle has developed several packages, but the one we talk about in this chat is called tidycensus. tidycensus allows R users to return Census and ACS data as tidyverse-ready data frames. Kyle had a rough start with R programming and he didn’t want anything to do with it for 3 years. What made him come back to R and become one of its renowned...

In this episode, I speak with Meghan Harris, a data integration specialist at the Primary Care Research Institute, University of Buffalo. There, she brings together data from multiple sources to create insights that benefit people affected by opioid use disorder. Meghan talks about how she uses R to pull data directly from Google Sheets, and highlights the advantages of this workflow as opposed to working on a manually downloaded Google Sheets file. Fun fact:  When Meghan is not creating data...

In this episode, I chat with Matt Herman about building websites in R. Matt shares lessons from his experience building a self-updating Covid-19 tracking site for Westchester County. Matt is a Data Scientist at the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center, where he focuses on research and policy analysis. Matt has created automated and reproducible workflows to generate outcome measures and performance indicators for several projects within the justice system. Check out the...

In this episode, I talk with Silvia Canelón, a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. Silvia why she loves using xaringan to create captivating, audience-friendly presentations directly from R markdown. Making presentations with R Markdown not only saves her time, but also eases the stress associated with updating and distributing presentations. Learn more about Silvia by visiting her website:...

In this episode, I talk with Aaron R. Williams, Livia Mucciolo and Safia Sayed about their experience using parameterized reporting to make State Fiscal Briefs. They discuss their approach and share advice for those contemplating parameterized reporting. Read more about Generating Multiple Reports at Once With Parameterized Reporting in Chapter 7 of R Without Statistics  Learn more about how parameterized reporting works  Connect with Aaron on LinkedIn and Twitter Connect with Livia on...

In this episode, I talk R Markdown with Alison Hill, the Director of Knowledge at Voltron Data. Before taking on this position, she held data science and education positions at IBM and RStudio. Alison has a passion for helping individuals improve the efficiency, accuracy, and reproducibility of their work through the use of R Markdown. During our chat, she shares her personal journey of learning R and the benefits of using R Markdown. You can learn more about Alison's work on her...

In this episode I speak with Abdoul Madjid about his journey to R.

In this episode, I speak with Tom Mock. Tom works at Posit (formerly RStudio) where he helped customers use that company's suite of products. Tom also loves building tables. I spoke with Tom about how he learned R, how he uses it today, and why he is so into making tables in R. You can find Tom on Twitter at https://twitter.com/thomas_mock. The blog post on making tables that we reference in our conversation is here: https://themockup.blog/posts/2020-09-04-10-table-rules-in-r/

Nassos Stylianou and Clara Guibourg, data journalists at the BBC, created a package called bbplot. This package contained a custom theme to help journalists at the BBC make plots that follow brand guidelines.

In this first episode of the R for the Rest of Us podcast, I speak with designers Cédric Scherer and Georgios Karamanis about how they learned data viz, why they use R for their work, and how they get inspired.