Malcolm Barrett
Research Software Engineer at Stanford University
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMalcolm Barrett is a research software engineer and epidemiologist with eight years of experience building open-source tools and teaching data science. He combines a PhD in Epidemiology with hands-on roles at Stanford, Posit, Apple, and Teladoc Health to translate complex public-health questions into reproducible software and analyses. A regular contributor to prominent R projects (devtools, targets, usethis), he focuses on modernizing codebases, improving robustness, and clarifying documentation for other developers. Malcolm’s work emphasizes tooling for reproducible workflows—evident in contributions like adding convenience utilities and dependency checks to targets and refactoring devtools to use modern fs operations. Based in Ann Arbor, he blends academic rigor with industry pragmatism and a knack for teaching practical open-source data science. Outside core research, he quietly drives usability improvements that help other scientists ship reliable code faster.
8 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Epidemiology, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Epidemiology at University of Southern CaliforniaBachelor's degree, Medical Anthropology, Bachelor's degree, Medical Anthropology at Eastern Michigan University
Japanese, Spanish
Stackoverflow
23reputation
514reached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (17)
reproducible-research10
github10
r-package10
r10
testing10
fs10
packager10
package10
documentation10
script-setup9
testthat9
setupapi9
setup-wizard9
project-setup9
inno-setup9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
r-lib/usethis
Feb 2018 - Aug 2022
Set up commonly used 📦 components
Role in this project:
Technical Writer & Package Maintainer
Technical Writer & Package MaintainerContributions:21 reviews, 42 commits, 48 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Malcolm primarily contributed to the documentation and maintenance of the `usethis` R package, focusing on clarifying existing documentation and refining user guidance. Their commits include edits to the README, NEWS, vignettes and source code documentation to enhance clarity and accuracy. Additionally, they implemented enhancements like adding new functionalities (e.g. edit_template), and updating the package dependencies, improving overall usability and reflecting current best practices.
reactcommonlyrstatsset-upsetup
ropensci/targets
Feb 2021 - Aug 2022
Function-oriented Make-like declarative workflows for R
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 11 commits, 4 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Malcolm contributed to the `targets` R package by enhancing its functionality and improving its robustness. Their work included adding `rlang::check_installed()` to validate package dependencies, catching and handling potential errors during package checks, and importing `check_installed` from `rlang`. Furthermore, the user introduced a new function `tar_load_everything()` for convenience and fixed a typo in the test files. These changes refined the target loading mechanisms and improved the overall stability of the package.
r-packagepipelinerdata-sciencehigh-performance-computing
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