Employment

I work as an University Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. I am also a principal investigator. I do research on sensory photobiology of plants, and other aspects of the role of acquisition and use of information by plants in acclimation.

I teach Ecology, Photobiology, Statistics and Reproducible Data Analysis with R and R markdown.

Experience

I have been using TeX and LaTeX since around 1987, initially mostly for literate programming in Modula-2 with MWEB. I have used different programming languages (BASIC, Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++, Java, Fortran, 6800 and 8086 assembler), scripting languages (awk, Perl, Ruby) and graphical programming systems (Stella, Simile, FlowStone).

I have been using R since around 1998. I have experience in designing and writing of R packages. This experience includes calling Java and Python libraries from R code and also in the use of the Rcpp package to write R-callable functions in C++. I have used markdown and to a lesser HTML, json and XML.

I have developed software and hardware for use in different aspects of my lab's research in plant science and solar radiation.

I have earlier held a lecturer position in Environmental Statistics and taught courses. I started teaching R to MSc students in 2001.

I have written the book Learn R: As a Language, published in July 2020 in CRC's The R Series. ISBN 9780367182533.

Current work

Of the R packages I have published in CRAN, three implementing extensions to 'ggplot2', called 'ggpmisc', 'ggpp' and 'ggpinnards' are currently the most popular.

I have developed a suite of R packages for photobiology supporting reproducibility in handling of spectral data, but also including functions such as astronomical calculations related to the position of the sun, day and night length, and water content in the atmosphere and evapotranspiration. Three packages contain collections of spectral transmission data for optical filters, and emission spectra for many different LEDs and lamp types. They are available through CRAN and supported at the R for Photobiology blog. Sources are at GitHub.

I am a member of the Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS), the Dataviz society, the TeX Users' Group (TUG) and a former member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). I am member of scientific societies related to plants, ecology, and photobiology.