Owen has also used R for nearly 20 years, and has particular expertise in teaching beginners, multivariate statistics, spatial data, programming, maximum likelihood estimation, and visualisation (i.e., nice graphs!). His research focuses on the causes and consequences of extinctions in a changing world. His group performs experiments with microbial communities, models the structure of food webs, analyses variation in biodiversity, and does fieldwork in Iceland, the UK, and Switzerland.

Natalie Cooper’s reasearch aims to understand broad-scale patterns of biodiversity. She uses cutting-edge phylogenetic comparative methods and various large datasets to investigate a variety of topics using R. She currently has projects on whales, snakes, dinosaurs, bryozoans, corals, pangolins, tenrecs, fishes, chameleons, amphibians and many more! Natalie is an advocate for diversity in STEM and reproducibility. In her spare time she likes to read, watch Netflix and climb mountains, while sticking it to the patriarchy.

Andrew is an evolutionary ecologists. He is interested in how the environment affects organism traits and how this determines the distribution and abundance of species and the complexity and structure of their communities. He’s been using R for more than 20 years and specialises in enthusiastically explaining things three or four different ways. He still likes learning to use new methods and tools. He also rides bicycles a fair bit.

Dylan has also used R for nearly 20 years, and has particular expertise in teaching beginners, additive models, numerical simulation techniques, integral projection models, and data visualisation. His research focuses on the environmental and demographic drivers of population dynamics and selection. His group models all kinds of organisms, from arable weeds such as black grass to the Soay sheep of St Kilda.