Robert Gentleman, PhD

Robert Gentleman is the founding executive director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Computational Biomedicine. An accomplished statistician and bioinformatician, Dr. Gentleman is one of the creators of the R programming language and a founder of the Bioconductor project, an open-source collaborative software tool to promote statistical analysis of biological data. He has served as vice president of 23andMe, where he helped launch their therapeutic division, and as senior director for bioinformatics and computational biology at Genentech. He was head of computational biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and held academic positions at Harvard University, University of Auckland and the University of Waterloo. Dr. Gentleman’s research interests are related to genomics, machine learning, data visualization, and the application of statistical and computational methods to study human disease.