People to Watch 2025 – Hadley Wickham
Hadley Wickham
Chief Scientist, Posit PBC
Hadley is a New Zealand statistician known for his work with the tidyverse, a collection of open source libraries for the R programming language, which is sometimes compared to pandas in Python. Hadley currently is the chief scientist for Posit PBC (formerly RStudio), where he leads the tidyverse team.
According to Hadley’s “tidy” approach to data manipulation in R, each variable should be a column, each observation should be a row, and each type of observational unit should be a table. “I build tools (computational and cognitive) that make data science easier, faster, and more fun,” he says on his website.
Hadley is also the creator of ggplot2, plyr, dplyr and reshape2 libraries. He also is the author or co-author of four books, including “R for Data Science,” “ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis,” “Advanced R,: and “R Packages.”
Hadley received a BS in biology and an MS in statistics from the University of Auckland, and his PhD in statistics from Iowa State University. He currently resides in Houston, Texas, where he is also employed as an adjunct professor at Rice University.
