Robert Clifford Gentleman is a Canadian statistician and bioinformatician currently vice president of computational biology at 23andMe.
Education
Gentleman was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of British Columbia. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Statistics from in 1988. His thesis title was Exploratory methods for censored data.
Career
He is recognized, along with Ross Ihaka, as one of the originators of the R programming language and the Bioconductor project Gentleman worked as a statistics professor at The University of Auckland in the mid 1990"s, where he developed the R programming language alongside Ross Ihaka. In 2001, he started work on the Bioconductor project to promote the development of open-source tools for bioinformatics and computational biology.
In 2009, Gentleman joined the Genentech biotechnology corporation, where he worked as a senior director in bioinformatics and computational biology.
Gentleman joined personal genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe as vice president in April 2015, with the goal of bringing expertise on bioinformatics and computational drug discovery to the company. Gentleman has also served on the board of the statistical software company Revolution Analytics (formerly known as REvolution Computing).