Hadley Wickham
Also known as Hadley Alexander Wickham
Hadley Wickham is a New Zealand-born statistician who builds R software for data analysis, including tools that connect R to large language models. He published a ggplot2 book in 2009 and won the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2019. In July 2025 he announced ellmer 0.3.0, an R package designed to make large language models easy to use from R. The American Statistical Association gave him its 2025 award for statistical computing and graphics. He is chief scientist at Posit, where he leads the tidyverse team.
Timeline
-
1999–2004
Degrees at the University of Auckland
Born in Hamilton, New Zealand, he earns a bachelor's degree in human biology and a master's degree in statistics at the University of Auckland in 1999–2004.
-
2008
A PhD at Iowa State
He completes his PhD at Iowa State University in 2008, supervised by Di Cook and Heike Hofmann.
-
2009
The ggplot2 book
He publishes ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis in 2009, a book in the Use R! series.
-
2015
Named an ASA Fellow
The American Statistical Association names him a Fellow in 2015.
-
2019
The COPSS Presidents' Award
He wins the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2019 for work in statistical computing, visualisation, graphics, and data analysis.
-
2025
An ASA statistical computing award
The American Statistical Association gives him its 2025 Award for Statistical Computing and Graphics.
-
July 2025
An R package for LLMs
He announces ellmer 0.3.0 in July 2025, an R package designed to make large language models easy to use from R.
-
As of October 2026
Chief scientist at Posit
He is chief scientist at Posit, where he leads the tidyverse team. On Posit's AI product page, he takes a raw TidyTuesday dataset and live-codes an analysis using Posit AI.
Sources and credits
Photo: We have no published photo of Hadley Wickham yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.