Heather Turner
Principal Research Software Engineer at The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Birmingham, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolHeather Turner is a Principal Research Software Engineer and statistican with over 21 years of experience building and sustaining R-based tools across academia, industry and consultancy. She leads projects to broaden R contributor diversity and software sustainability, currently heading "Enabling the Next Generation of Contributors to R" at the University of Birmingham after an EPSRC fellowship at Warwick focused on sustainability and EDI. Heather combines deep statistical modelling and biostatistics expertise (including package development like gnm and BradleyTerry2) with hands-on work in drug discovery, bioinformatics and mass spectrometry analysis. An active R Foundation board member since 2016, she is known for translating novel methods into production-quality R packages and for pragmatic code review and reproducible reporting. Colleagues rely on her rare blend of rigorous academic research, practical consultancy problem-solving, and community leadership to deliver robust, inclusive research software.
21 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Statistics; Mathematical Sciences; Statistics, BSc, Statistics; Mathematical Sciences; Statistics at University of ReadingPost Graduate Award Learning & Teaching in Higher Education, Post Graduate Award Learning & Teaching in Higher Education at University of WarwickPhD, Statistics, PhD, Statistics at University of Exeter
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (143)
starter-kit10
sweave10
logos10
tidyverse10
knitr10
branding10
literate-programming10
iconic10
nonlinear10
r10
statistics10
quarto10
dplyr10
generalized-linear-models10
data-visualization10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
r-devel/r-devel.github.io
Dec 2020 - Jan 2023
R Contributor Site - for people interested in contributing to R core development
Contributions:86 commits, 3 PRs, 92 pushes in 2 years 1 month
r
r-devel/r-dev-env
Jun 2023 - Mar 2025
A containerised development environment for editing and compiling the R source code.
Contributions:1 release, 41 reviews, 70 PRs in 1 year 9 months
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