Who we are
Professor Anthony Richardson
Anthony is Professor of Mathematical Ecology at the University of Queensland. He has a passion for mentoring and teaches some of the largest under-graduate classes in his university, as well as supervising numerous PhD students.
He researches the effects of global change on ocean life, especially the tiny plankton that are the basis of ocean food-webs.
Working with plankton, which are not visible to the naked eye, means he relies heavily on the statistics that R provides to better understand ecological patterns.
For instance, Anthony has written foundational papers on topics as diverse as the response of plankton to climate change and the use of machine learning to identify patterns in satellite images of the oceans.
Dr David Schoeman
Dave is Associate Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, where he teaches ecology and statistics.
Dave started to learn R a little more than decade ago. Being partially self-taught, with regular guidance from AJ Smit (now at the University of the Western Cape) and Anthony Richardson, he spend an inordinate amount of time making mistakes.
He likes to think that teaching R to emerging generations of numerate ecologists will help them learn R more efficiently than he did, thereby giving them more time to spend on actually analysing data, which is the fun part.
His research passion is the conservation of sandy beaches - a much overlooked ecosystem.
When he is not out counting ghost crabs, Dave is at most at home coding up R scripts to analyse large data-sets. He frequently publishes his work in top academic journals Nature and Science, including global scale analyses for how warming is affecting ocean ecosystems.
Dr Chris Brown
Chris is a research fellow at Griffith University. His research looks at how we can balance the needs of humans with their impacts on ecosystems. He studies the impacts of climate change, fishing and pollution on ocean ecosystems.
Chris has built his career in ecological modelling using R and is passionate about teaching R’s benefits to others.
His passion for R as a tool for ecological analysis began when David Schoeman and Anthony Richardson taught him R during a project on global climate change. Through their supervision he learned how to synthesise and visualise large data-sets that examined the impacts of climate change on ocean life.
The work was subsequently published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report. Chris was hooked on R as a tool for communicating complex data-sets to decision makers.
He regularly teaches R to students and colleagues both at his home institution of Griffith University, but also around Australia and overseas.