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]

Education

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]

Research and career

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]

Awards and honors

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]

References

  1. ^ Robert Gentleman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Gentleman, R. (2005). "Reproducible Research: A Bioinformatics Case Study". Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology. 4: Article2. doi:10.2202/1544-6115.1034. PMID 16646837. S2CID 17729314.
  3. ^ a b c "Bioinformatics Pioneer Robert Gentleman, Ph.D., Joins 23andMe Leadership Team". Retrieved 10 August 2015.
  4. ^ a b "Robert Gentleman on His Goals for Drug Discovery at 23andMe". Retrieved 10 August 2015.
  5. ^ a b Ihaka, R.; Gentleman, R. (1996). "R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics". Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. 5 (3): 299–314. doi:10.2307/1390807. JSTOR 1390807.
  6. ^ Ashlee Vance (6 January 2009). "R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts – NYTimes.com". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  7. ^ Gentleman, R. C.; Carey, V. J.; Bates, D. M.; Bolstad, B.; Dettling, M.; Dudoit, S.; Ellis, B.; Gautier, L.; Ge, Y.; Gentry, J.; Hornik, K.; Hothorn, T.; Huber, W.; Iacus, S.; Irizarry, R.; Leisch, F.; Li, C.; Maechler, M.; Rossini, A. J.; Sawitzki, G.; Smith, C.; Smyth, G.; Tierney, L.; Yang, J. Y.; Zhang, J. (2004). "Bioconductor: Open software development for computational biology and bioinformatics". Genome Biology. 5 (10): R80. doi:10.1186/gb-2004-5-10-r80. PMC 545600. PMID 15461798.
  8. ^ Robert Gentleman at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  9. ^ Gentleman, Robert Clifford (1988). Exploratory methods for censored data (PhD thesis). University of Washington. ProQuest 303589316.
  10. ^ a b Wolfson, Wendy. "A Bioinformatics Chief and a Gentleman". Retrieved 10 August 2015.
  11. ^ Gaudet, P.; Bairoch, A.; Field, D.; Sansone, S. -A.; Taylor, C.; Attwood, T. K.; Bateman, A.; Blake, J. A.; Bult, C. J.; Cherry, J. M.; Chisholm, R. L.; Cochrane, G.; Cook, C. E.; Eppig, J. T.; Galperin, M. Y.; Gentleman, R.; Goble, C. A.; Gojobori, T.; Hancock, J. M.; Howe, D. G.; Imanishi, T.; Kelso, J.; Landsman, D.; Lewis, S. E.; Karsch Mizrachi, I.; Orchard, S.; Ouellette, B. F. F.; Ranganathan, S.; Richardson, L.; Rocca-Serra, P. (2011). "Towards BioDBcore: A community-defined information specification for biological databases". Database. 2011: baq027. doi:10.1093/database/baq027. PMC 3017395. PMID 21205783.
  12. ^ "Genentech: Research: Robert C. Gentleman". Archived from the original on 2011-07-04. Retrieved 2011-04-17. Robert C. Gentleman Senior Director: Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
  13. ^ "Benjamin Franklin Award – Bioinformatics.org". Retrieved 10 December 2016.
  14. ^ "ISCB Fellows". Retrieved 10 August 2015.
  15. ^ "ASA Fellows list". American Statistical Association. Archived from the original on 2017-12-01. Retrieved 2017-11-02.