Purpose
Our summit builds on one of the initial goals of R/Pharma - to bring people together in a room and start the conversations. The first two years of R/Pharma were solely in-person events where amazing work was discussed, sparking industry initiatives. When we moved to online conferences, the benefit of face-to-face interaction was lost. The R/Pharma Summit brings it back.
Our face-to-face summits bring thought leaders and decision makers together to discuss all things open source and Pharma. The US summit takes place alongside posit::conf. In 2026, we also held our inaugural EU summit at Novartis in Basel, Switzerland, on October 5, alongside BioTechX. The notes taken, and any actions, are shared with the community.
Prior Summits
2026 F2F Roundtables in Basel (EU Summit)
The inaugural R/Pharma EU Summit took place at Novartis in Basel, Switzerland, on October 5, 2026, alongside BioTechX. Participants discussed the following five round-table topics:
2026 F2F Roundtables in Houston (United States)
90+ leaders met F2F in Houston (September 13th) for a series of discussions on the most pressing topics for use of AI, environment reproducibility, use of open source in regulatory submissions, and more.
The discussion was crowdsourced via a github discussion, and led to the following topics:
2025 F2F Roundtables in Atlanta
100+ leaders from 40+ companies met F2F in Atlanta (September 15th) for a series of discussions on the most pressing topics for late-stage reporting in R.
The discussion was crowdsourced via a github discussion, and led to the following topics:
2024 F2F Roundtables in Seattle
~120 leaders from 40+ companies met F2F in Seattle (August 11th) for a series of discussions on the most pressing topics for late-stage reporting in R.
The discussion was crowdsourced via a github discussion, and led to the following topics:
- Future core competency of clinical statistical programmer with AI/LLM
- Transitioning our people from SAS to R
- Can we do data storage and processing better in clinical trials?
- R package validation
- Sharing R data products externally
- Leveraging operational metrics for better SCEs/platforms
- Validation of shiny apps
- How best to engage and enable small/mid-size pharma to use R and open source tools
2023 F2F Roundtables in Chicago
~60 leaders from 40+ companies met F2F in Chicago (Septembe 18th) for a series of discussions on the most pressing topics for late-stage reporting in R.
The discussion was crowdsourced via a github discussion, and led to the following topics:
- What should we be doing to leverage advances in LLMs/AA/AI impact? (at the drug development through to developer efficiency levels)
- The case for contributing to OS
- Where are we with our people?
- What is the path to an interactive CSR?
- What are the barriers bringing imaging/genomics/digital biomarkers and the CRF closer?
- What are the risks with our increasing external business code dependencies?
- What are our goals for a modern clinical reporting workflow, on a modern SCE?
- We have a path to R package validation - but what are we doing with shiny apps?