Ben Bolker
Professor at McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Bolker is a Professor of Ecology and Evolution with 20 years of academic experience bridging mathematical and statistical methods with ecological and epidemiological questions. Based at McMaster University after faculty roles at the University of Florida and research at Princeton, he applies rigorous quantitative tools to biological problems and trains the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists. An experienced contributor to the R ecosystem, he enhanced the widely used tidymodels/broom package to better tidy mixed-effects and Bayesian model objects, bringing practical improvements like confidence intervals and support for rstan and geepack. With a PhD from Cambridge and a physics BS from Yale, he combines deep theoretical training with hands-on data-science tooling—an uncommon mix that helps translate complex models into usable inference for both researchers and public-health applications.
20 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Zoology, PhD, Zoology at University of CambridgeBS, Physics, BS, Physics at Yale Universitypostdoc, ecology, postdoc, ecology at Princeton University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (65)
regression10
shuffle10
tidyr10
ggplot10
optimization10
matrix10
r10
statistics10
plot10
tidy10
csv10
missing-data10
vector10
statistical-models10
rmarkdown10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
tidymodels/broom
Jun 2015 - Aug 2022
Convert statistical analysis objects from R into tidy format
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:1 review, 21 commits, 9 PRs in 7 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on enhancing the `broom` package's capabilities for tidying mixed-effects model objects from the `lme4` package. Their work involved adding confidence intervals for fixed and random effects, incorporating different methods, and including random effects modes in the output. They also contributed by adding support for tidying objects from the `geepack` and `rstan` packages, enhancing the tools available for statistical model analysis.
r-packagestatisticshypothesis-testingregression-modelstidymodels
glmmTMB/glmmTMB
Aug 2015 - Dec 2022
glmmTMB
Contributions:9 reviews, 1393 commits, 400 PRs in 7 years 5 months
glmmtmblinear-modelsr-language
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