Robert Clifford Gentleman (born 1959) is a Canadian statistician and

bioinformatician Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combine ...

who is currently the founding executive director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School. He was previously vice president of computational biology at

23andMe 23andMe Holding Co. is a publicly held personal genomics and biotechnology company based in South San Francisco, California. It is best known for providing a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service in which customers provide a saliva sample t ...

. Gentleman is recognized, along with

Ross Ihaka George Ross Ihaka (born 1954) is a New Zealand statistician who was an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland until his retirement in 2017. Alongside Robert Gentleman, he is one of the creators of the R programming lang ...

, as one of the originators of the

R programming language R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinform ...

and the

Bioconductor Bioconductor is a Free software, free, Open-source software, open source and Open source software development, open development software project for the analysis and comprehension of Genome, genomic data generated by Wet laboratory, wet lab experi ...

project.

Education

Gentleman was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

. He was awarded a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

degree in

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

from

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

in 1988; his thesis title was ''Exploratory methods for censored data''.

Research and career

Gentleman worked as a statistics professor at

The University of Auckland , mottoeng = By natural ability and hard work , established = 1883; years ago , endowment = NZD $293 million (31 December 2021) , budget = NZD $1.281 billion (31 December 2021) , chancellor = Cecilia Tarrant , vice_chancellor = Dawn F ...

in the mid-1990s, where he developed the

alongside

. In 2001, he started work on the

project to promote the development of open-source tools for bioinformatics and

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

. In 2009, Gentleman joined the

Genentech Genentech, Inc., is an American biotechnology corporation headquartered in South San Francisco, California. It became an independent subsidiary of Roche in 2009. Genentech Research and Early Development operates as an independent center within R ...

biotechnology corporation, where he worked as a senior director in bioinformatics and computational biology. Robert C. Gentleman Senior Director: Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Gentleman joined

personal genomics Personal genomics or consumer genetics is the branch of genomics concerned with the sequencing, analysis and interpretation of the genome of an individual. The genotyping stage employs different techniques, including single-nucleotide polymorphi ...

and

biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...

company 23andMe as vice president in April 2015, with the goal of bringing expertise on bioinformatics and computational drug discovery to the company. Gentleman has also served on the board of the statistical software company

Revolution Analytics Revolution Analytics (formerly REvolution Computing) is a statistical software company focused on developing open source and "open-core" versions of the free and open source software R for enterprise, academic and analytics customers. Revolution ...

(formerly known as REvolution Computing).

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. He was made a Fellow of the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mole ...

in 2014 for his contribution to computational biology and bioinformatics. He became a fellow of the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

in 2017.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gentleman, Robert 1959 births Living people Canadian bioinformaticians Canadian statisticians University of Washington alumni Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology R (programming language) people