Julia Silge

Timeline

1. 2000–2005

   Physics and an astronomy PhD

   She studies physics at Texas A&M University, graduating in 2000. At the University of Texas at Austin, she earns an M.A. in 2002 and a PhD in astronomy in 2005.

2. 2015

   From galaxies to data science

   After postdoctoral research on the dynamics of galaxies, teaching and work in ed tech, she moves into data science in 2015 and discovers R. She spends several years as a data scientist in the nonprofit sector.

3. 2016–2017

   Tidytext and Text Mining with R

   With David Robinson, she publishes tidytext, an R package for text mining and analysis using tidy data principles, in the Journal of Open Source Software in July 2016. Their book Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach comes out in 2017, with examples from Jane Austen novels to NASA metadata, and the pair apply text mining to job postings at Stack Overflow.

4. 2016–2019

   Data scientist at Stack Overflow

   She joins the Stack Overflow data team in December 2016 as its second data scientist. In 2019, she is the data scientist on the annual Developer Survey, from initial design to writing about the results, when almost 90,000 people respond. By November 2019, she also sits on the Technical Advisory Committee of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

5. By 2020

   Tidymodels at RStudio

   By May 2020, she works at RStudio, the company later renamed Posit, alongside teammates such as Alison Hill and Max Kuhn, and she publishes a tidymodels-centric version of her free online course Supervised Machine Learning: Case Studies in R. She is one of the earlier developers of the tidymodels framework for modeling in R.

6. 2022

   Vetiver and two modeling books

   In June 2022, she and Isabel Zimmerman announce vetiver, an MLOps framework for R and Python that versions, shares, deploys and monitors trained models. She publishes Supervised Machine Learning for Text Analysis in R with Emil Hvitfeldt through Chapman & Hall in 2022, and Tidy Modeling with R, a guide to the tidymodels packages, with Max Kuhn through O'Reilly in July 2022.

7. 2024

   Introducing the Positron IDE

   By 2024, she is an engineering manager at Posit, heading a team of developers who build open-source software for data science and MLOps in Python and R, and she gives a keynote, The Right Tool for the Job, at SciPy 2024. At posit::conf in 2024, she introduces Positron, the next-generation data science IDE she works on, which is built as a fork of Code OSS.

8. As of October 2026

   Senior engineering manager at Posit

   She is a senior engineering manager at Posit, where she works on data science tools such as Positron and vetiver. In October 2026, she writes the release highlights for Positron 2026.10, which adds a Posit Assistant that can drive Positron itself and a built-in MCP server for coding agents. Her team's SQL tools in Positron also serve as a harness for AI assistants, the subject of her talk at Data Outpost in San Francisco in November 2026.