Robert Gentleman | |
---|---|
Born | Robert Clifford Gentleman |
Alma mater | University of Washington University of British Columbia |
Known for | R (programming language) |
Awards | Benjamin Franklin Award (Bioinformatics) |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Genentech University of Washington Harvard Medical School University of Waterloo The University of Auckland |
Thesis | Exploratory methods for censored data (1988) |
Doctoral advisor | John James Crowley [1] |
Robert Clifford Gentleman (born 1959) is a Canadian statistician and bioinformatician [2] who is currently the founding executive director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School. He was previously the vice president of computational biology at 23andMe. [3] [4] Gentleman is recognized, along with Ross Ihaka, as one of the originators of the R programming language [5] [6] and the Bioconductor project. [7] [8]
Gentleman was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of British Columbia. [3] He was awarded a Ph.D. degree in statistics from University of Washington in 1988; his thesis title was Exploratory methods for censored data. [9]
Gentleman worked as a statistics professor at the University of Auckland in the mid-1990s, where he developed the R programming language alongside Ross Ihaka. [5] [10] In 2001, he started work on the Bioconductor project to promote the development of open-source tools for bioinformatics and computational biology. In 2009, Gentleman joined the Genentech biotechnology corporation, where he worked as a senior director in bioinformatics and computational biology. [11] [12] Gentleman joined personal genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe as vice president in April 2015, [3] with the goal of bringing expertise on bioinformatics and computational drug discovery to the company. [4] Gentleman has also served on the board of the statistical software company Revolution Analytics (formerly known as REvolution Computing). [10]
Gentleman won the Benjamin Franklin Award in 2008, recognising his work on the R programming language, the Bioconductor project and his commitment to data and methods sharing. [13] He was made a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2014 for his contribution to computational biology and bioinformatics. [14] He became a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2017. [15]
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