Jonathan McPherson and the posit::conf(2025) Keynote Lineup
We are just weeks away from our favorite event in the data science calendar: posit::conf(2025), taking place in Atlanta from September 16th to 18th! Get ready for an incredible three days packed with insightful talks, hands-on workshops, and unparalleled networking opportunities with the brightest minds in R and Python (and beyond).
We’re thrilled to give you a sneak peek at our phenomenal keynote lineup. This year, we are honored to have Jonathan McPherson headlining with what promises to be an inspiring and forward-looking address. But that’s not all. You’ll also hear from Posit’s very own data science legends Hadley Wickham and Joe Cheng, alongside the brilliant Cat Hicks and Kieran Healy.
Want to learn more about these influential speakers and discover some fun facts about them (in their own words)? Keep reading below!
Jonathan McPherson
Jonathan McPherson, Software Architect at Posit, primarily works on the Positron IDE. His role focuses on connecting different parts of the system, though he also enjoys occasional UI work, driven by a desire to build visible products. In the past, Jonathan spent many years contributing to RStudio, helping it evolve into Posit Workbench. Before joining Posit, he worked on Office at Microsoft and various web projects.
Fun facts about Jonathan
- I worked at Microsoft for nine years but never met Bill Gates.
- My first project at Microsoft involved helping to remove Clippy.
- I read a book every week or two, enjoying both fiction and non-fiction.
- I have never seen the 1997 movie “Titanic.”
- I’ve crossed an international border on my bicycle (into Canada).
- BASIC was my first computer language.
- My first large computer program was a tool to create ANSI art.
- I have an uncanny ability to perfectly guess the microwave time for any food.
Cat Hicks
Cat Hicks is a psychologist for software teams, a research architect and defender of the mismeasured. Cat is the founder and principal scientist at Catharsis Consulting, a scientific consultancy that helps engineering organizations transform with human-centered evidence strategies. She is the author of the Developer Thriving framework, the AI Skill Threat framework, and many ambitious projects breaking new ground in an open science for developers, surfacing industry-changing empirical evidence to help organizations and individuals achieve sustainable, resilient innovation in technology and create more wellbeing for technologists.
Cat holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, serves on the Advisory Council of the University of San Diego Center for Digital Civil Society, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of software teams.
At posit::conf, Cat will discuss topics such as interventions to improve developers’ psychological experience, how learning cultures support technology teams as they face rapidly-changing technologies such as AI tooling, and using evidence to help tech cultures.
Fun facts about Cat
- I host a podcast with my wife, Ashley Juavinett, a neuroscientist faculty member at UCSD! It’s called Change, Technically, and we focus on stories about change in our shared worlds of technology, STEM education, and open science.
- I am a devoted sewist, a hobby that started when I felt frustrated by the options available in womenswear for professionals and wanted to learn to make blazers and suits. Now, I like to sew conference outfits that match the data visualizations in my research. One of my favorites is this goldenrod yellow flight suit, which matches the “Thriving” variables in my New Developer/AI Skill Threat research.
Kieran Healy
Kieran Healy teaches at Duke University, where he is Professor of Sociology. Originally from Ireland, he has lived in the US for many years. Much of his research has been about the social organization of exchange in human blood and organs, cultural goods, software, and ideas. His most recent book, The Ordinal Society (https://theordinalsociety.com/, co-authored with Marion Fourcade), is about how the widespread availability of continuously-produced data about people has transformed how the world is organized. He is also the author of Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction (https://socviz.co/), which has helped a lot of people get started using ggplot.
Kieran’s talk will address “Trustworthy Data Visualization”, asking what it means for visual representations of data to be trustworthy, and what tools like R and ggplot can—and cannot—do to help us achieve that goal.
Fun facts about Kieran
- I have been using R since it was a different letter.
- I have a habit of collecting and repairing vintage computers, several of which run very early versions of R. One of them lives in my office and is very handy for annoying students when they complain that they are running out of memory for their data analysis.
Hadley Wickham
Hadley Wickham is Chief Scientist at Posit, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (e.g., the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr) and principled software development (e.g., roxygen2, testthat, and pkgdown). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science.
Fun facts about Hadley
- My favourite cocktail of the summer is the More Supreme.
- I love making funny pictures (memes) with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT is so slow that I always add them to chat a beat too late, which has now become funny in its own right.
- My favorite lesser-known package is waldo. It makes it easy to see the difference between complex data structures and is used to power failure messages from testthat::expect_equal().
- I love gongs. The bigger, the better. I found my favorite gong (so far) at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Arts.
Joe Cheng
Joe Cheng is the Chief Technology Officer and first employee at Posit, where he helped create the RStudio IDE and Shiny web framework, along with countless complementary tools and packages.
Fun facts about Joe
- I am the “other” Joe Cheng. The main Joe Cheng is a Taiwanese actor and model, and I sometimes receive emails from his fans. I like to think he sometimes receives emails with questions about Shiny.
- My developer crushes are Volodymyr Agafonkin, Julia Evans, and Simon Willison.
- My favorite kind of code to write is parsing code. In my 20s, I co-wrote a Java email parser (RFC2822, RFC2045) called Mime4j that at some point was used by Android’s built-in email client.
- I used to suffer from impostor syndrome, but got over it years ago, except for anytime I talk to Lionel Henry. That guy is wicked smart.
Register for posit::conf(2025) today
Ready to join Jonathan, Cat, Kieran, Hadley, and Joe in Atlanta? Visit the posit::conf website today to secure your place, browse the full agenda, and prepare for an unforgettable experience. We can’t wait to see you there!
