Jenny Bryan

Also known as Jennifer Bryan

Jenny Bryan is a statistician turned software engineer who builds data-science tools at Posit, from the tidyverse R packages to the Positron IDE. After a Yale degree in 1992 and consulting work at Boston Consulting Group, she earned a biostatistics PhD at Berkeley in 2001 and taught statistics at the University of British Columbia until 2018, where her STAT 545 course became an early example of data science taught in a statistics program. In January 2017 she joined RStudio, co-authored "Welcome to the Tidyverse" in 2019, and said in 2025 that her early skepticism about LLMs for coding changed once she used them on Rust and TypeScript. She is a senior software engineer at Posit, on the tidyverse and Positron teams.

Now at: Posit Software, PBC
Badges: Bridge
Links: Website, Google Scholar, X and GitHub

Timeline

1992–1994

Yale degree and consulting

She earns a B.A. in Economics and German literature at Yale University in 1992. From 1992 to 1994, she is an Associate at the Boston Consulting Group's Boston office.
2001

A biostatistics PhD at Berkeley

She completes a Ph.D. and M.A. in Biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, working under Mark van der Laan.
2001–2018

Statistics professor at UBC

She joins the University of British Columbia as an assistant professor of statistics in 2001 and becomes an associate professor with tenure in 2009, a post she holds until 2018. Under her direction, STAT 545 becomes an early example of a data science course taught in a statistics program.
2016

R Foundation membership

She is elected to Ordinary Membership in the R Foundation in 2016, which UBC Statistics announces as recognition of substantial contributions to the R project. She is also the founding academic director of UBC's Master of Data Science Program in 2016.
2017

Joining RStudio's tidyverse team

In January 2017, she joins Hadley Wickham's team at RStudio as a software engineer. Her first project there is the readxl package, and with an intern she creates googledrive, a package for using Google Drive from R.
2017–2019

Good practices and the tidyverse paper

In 2017, she co-authors "Good enough practices in scientific computing" in PLOS Computational Biology with Greg Wilson, Karen Cranston, Justin Kitzes, Lex Nederbragt and Tracy K. Teal. In 2019, she is one of 24 authors of "Welcome to the Tidyverse" in the Journal of Open Source Software.
2025

Positron tools and LLM coding

In 2025, she joins Posit's Data Science Hangout to talk about adapting a career to new technologies and about Positron, Ark and Air, tools for the R ecosystem. She says her early skepticism about LLMs for coding in R changed once she used them on problems in Rust and TypeScript.
As of October 2026

Senior engineer at Posit

As of October 2026, she is a senior software engineer at Posit on the tidyverse and Positron teams. She maintains packages such as usethis, readxl, devtools and readr, and is co-author with Hadley Wickham of the second edition of R Packages.

Career

NowPosit Software, PBCSenior Software Engineer
From 2017RStudioSoftware Engineer
2001–2018University of British ColumbiaAssistant Professor of Statistics, Associate Professor of Statistics
1992–1994Boston Consulting GroupAssociate