Hadley Wickham

Hadley Wickham is a statistician from New Zealand who is currently Chief Scientist at RStudio and an adjunct Assistant Professor of statistics at Rice University. He is best known for his development of open-source statistical analysis software packages for R (programming language) that implement logics of data visualisation and data transformation. Wickham received a Bachelors of Human Biology, and a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in statistics at the University of Auckland in 1999–2004 and his PhD at Iowa State University in 2008 under the supervision of Di Cook and Heike Hoffman. In 2006 he was awarded the John Chambers Award for Statistical Computing for his work developing tools for data reshaping and visualisation. He is a prominent and active member of the R user community and has developed several notable and widely used packages including ggplot2, plyr, dplyr, and reshape2. Wickham's data analysis packages for R are collectively known as the 'tidyverse'. Wickham's packages and writing are known for advocating a 'tidy' approach to data import, analysis and modelling methods. According to Wickham's tidy approach, each variable should be a column, each observation should be a row, and each type of observational unit should be a table. He was named a Fellow by the American Statistical Association in 2015 for "pivotal contributions to statistical practice through innovative and pioneering research in statistical graphics and computing".