About the Authors

Ewen Harrison is a surgeon and Riinu Pius is a physicist. And they’re both data scientists, too. They dabble in a few programming languages and are generally all over technology. They are most enthusiastic about the R statistical programming language and have a combined experience of 25 years using it. They work at the University of Edinburgh and have taught R to hundreds of healthcare professionals and researchers.

They believe a first introduction to R and statistical programming should be relatively jargon-free and outcome-oriented (get those pretty plots out). The understanding of complicated concepts will come over time with practice and experience, not through a re-telling of the history of computing bit-by-byte, or with the inclusion of the underlying equations for each statistical test (although Ewen has sneaked a few equations in).

Overall, they hope to make the text fun and accessible. Just like them.