The what and the why for R/Pharma

Background

By design, R/Pharma is deliberately a smaller conference in terms of attendance in order to encourage maximum opportunities for direct interaction with speakers. In 2018 and 2019 the conference was held in the Tsai Auditorium at the Center for Government and International Studies, Harvard University and capped at 150 attendees. The conference was run as a free event. Invitations were based on committee membership and advisory support, speaker acceptance, academic/student and diversity.

The conference has been run with single track consisting of keynotes from renowned industry practitioners to key R developers to leading academics. In addition there were a number of pre-conference workshops and full-length presentations as well as a number of shorter, highly-energetic lightning talks.

In 2020 we took a hiatus from holding the meeting at Harvard and ran a virtual conference. Over 1100 people registered for the three day virtual event that was preceded by a week of 11 workshops.

Following the success of the 2020 event the organizing committee decided to hold a virtual event for the 2021 meeting. 2000 people registered for the three day event which included three panel discussion groups on the areas of validation, training and leadership and scaling shiny. In addition, we held 14 workshops around the conference dates.

In 2022 we will be running a virtual event again.

Our entire event is a community-lead effort and 100% volunteer run. The event is vendor neutral and very much an academic conference. Harvard has been very helpful in hosting the event.

The R/Pharma conference is an event focused on the use of R in the development of pharmaceuticals. The conference covers topics including reproducible research, regulatory compliance and validation, safety monitoring, clinical trials, drug discovery, research & development, PK/PD/pharmacometrics, genomics, diagnostics, immunogenicity and more. All are discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool within the drug development process. The conference showcases the current use of R that is helping to drive biomedical research, drug discovery & development, and clinical initiatives. (Note that topics related to the use of R in hospitals/clinics for patient care by clinicians, doctors, and researchers is the focus of R/Medicine.

R/Pharma is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability or any feature that distinguishes human beings.