Jennifer "Jenny" Bryan | |
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Occupations |
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Known for | R packages |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Yale University (B.A.) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
Website | https://jennybryan.org |
Jennifer "Jenny" Bryan is a data scientist and an associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia where she developed the Master in Data Science Program. She is a statistician and software engineer at RStudio from Vancouver, Canada and is known for creating open source tools which connect R to Google Sheets and Google Drive. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Bryan earned her Bachelor of Arts in Economics and German literature from Yale University in 1992 and her PhD in Biostatistics from University of California, Berkeley in 2001. [5] [6]
As an associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia, [7] Bryan worked on biostatistics with a focus on gene expression and microarray data. Notable projects to which she has contributed include the quantification of photomotor responses in larval zebrafish, [8] the development of an assay system in the multicellular animal Caenorhabditis elegans to test genetic interactions causing synthetic lethality in somatic cells, [9] and a novel yeast-based model to search for modifier genes involved in cystic fibrosis. [10] Beyond biostatistics, Bryan has also contributed to medoids-based clustering methods. [11] Her general science contributions include a manifesto published in PLOS One on good practices for scientific computing [12] and an introduction to the Git version control system [13] for research data analysis. [14] [15] [16]
Bryan's teaching activities at UBC included development of the Master of Data Science Program [17] and new materials for the STAT 545 course. [18] Under Bryan's direction, the STAT 545 course became notable as an early example of a data science course taught in a statistics program. It is also notable for its focus on teaching using modern R packages, Git and GitHub, its extensive sharing of teaching materials openly online, and its strong emphasis on practical data cleaning, exploration, and visualization skills, rather than algorithms and theory. [15] As of late 2016 Bryan is on leave from her UBC position and is working at RStudio with a team led by Hadley Wickham. [3]
Bryan has had experience with S and R since 1996. [1] [7] She is known for her open source contributions in R. [19] Influential contributions include the use of Lego [20] and the concept of data rectangling [21] for explaining programming concepts, [22] [23] reproducible research, [24] and advice on project and workflow organisation. [25] [26] [27]
Bryan is well known for her work on efficient methods of working in spreadsheets, and the connection between R and spreadsheet software such as Excel and Google Sheets. [4] She is the primary developer of the R package googlesheets, that connects R to the Google Sheets service, [28] and googledrive, an R package for interfacing between R and Google Drive.
Bryan is known for her work in teaching, her contributions to R packages, and her involvement with the leadership committee at rOpenSci. [29] [30] She is also part of the R Foundation Forwards task force and a member of the editorial board of BMC Bioinformatics. [30] [31] Previously, she worked as an Associate at the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, MA. [6]
Bryan lives with her husband, three children, and dog, Toby. [1] [31] [32]