useR! Conference 2026

### Dariia Mykhailyshyna

Keynote: R Under Sirens: Research, Students, and Community in Wartime Ukraine

Dariia Mykhailyshyna is a postdoctoral researcher in Economics at the Kyiv School of Economics. She earned her PhD from the University of Bologna in 2025, specializing in applied microeconomics with a focus on political economy, migration, education, and labour. A dedicated R user for over seven years, she integrates R into all stages of her research and teaching. She also organizes the Workshops for Ukraine series, supporting learners and educators during wartime disruptions. Her keynote explores how R enables empirical research, classroom instruction, and community coordination under the conditions of Russia’s full-scale invasion, drawing on feedback from Ukrainian R users to distinguish wartime-specific challenges from broader learning barriers.

### Peter Dalgaard

Keynote: Release Management and Governance Structure of the R Project

Peter Dalgaard has been a member of the R Core Team since 1997. He is Professor of Statistics at Copenhagen Business School, following nearly 25 years at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Biostatistics. His keynote traces the early history of R and outlines the principles guiding R Core development, with a focus on release management. He also examines the roles of CRAN, the R Foundation, and the R Consortium in sustaining the project’s governance, offering reflections on how these structures support long-term sustainability and where improvements might be made.

### Dianne Cook

Keynote: Interactive Graphics for Understanding and Interpreting Nonlinear Model Behaviour in High Dimensions, using R

Dianne Cook is Professor of Statistics in Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University in Melbourne. She holds a PhD from Rutgers University and is internationally recognized for her work in statistical graphics and interactive visualization. A Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Board Member of the R Foundation, she has served as editor of The R Journal and Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. Her keynote challenges the cultural resistance to visual diagnostics in modeling, demonstrating how interactive graphics can reveal model behavior in high-dimensional spaces. She introduces the Rashomon quartet and shows how visual methods can be integrated into the tidymodels workflow to enhance model explainability.

### Jakub Nowosad

Keynote: A World Still to Be Mapped: Reflections on Geocomputation in R

Jakub Nowosad is Associate Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and a visiting scientist at the University of Münster. A computational geographer, he develops spatial methods to analyze environmental and ecological patterns. He is co-author of Geocomputation with R and an active contributor to the #rspatial community. His keynote surveys the current landscape of spatial data science in R, emphasizing reproducible workflows, interoperable tools, and the role of maps in shaping perception and decision-making. He reflects on how R’s spatial ecosystem supports both rigorous analysis and intuitive exploration.

### Kari Jordan

Keynote: The Work Behind the Work: Sustaining R Through Community

Dr. Kari L. Jordan is Executive Director of The Carpentries, a global nonprofit advancing data literacy through inclusive education. She holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a PhD in Engineering Education from The Ohio State University, where she focused on belonging interventions for people of color in STEM. Her keynote highlights the invisible labor that sustains the R ecosystem—teaching, mentoring, organizing, and maintaining. Drawing on her leadership experience, she explores how community care, governance, and diverse contributions shape technical ecosystems. Her talk invites attendees to reflect on their role in sustaining R and offers pathways for deeper engagement.