Hi there!

I’m an academic statistician at the Australian National University (ANU) living in Canberra with a passion for data science and open-source software. I’m currently the Deputy Director at the Biological Data Science Institute and an Executive Editor of the R Journal. I also have affiliation at the ANU Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Statistics, where I visit on a weekly basis.

My primary interest is to develop impactful methods and tools that can be readily used by practitioners. I enjoy working in collaborative environment with people from diverse backgrounds, with an aim to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the real world data. I interface across multiple disciplines to bridge statistical concepts and findings to a broad range of individuals. To this end, I have developed numerous open-source tools, primarily as R-packages, and resources aimed at making statistical methods accessible to a diverse audience.

I take a proactive approach to community development. I’m actively involved in the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA), International Biometrics Society (Australasian Region) and other committees. I recently completed my term as President of the SSA Victorian Branch. My contributions have been recognised by the SSA Distinguished Presenter’s Award, SSA Leadership in Statistics and featured on the list of 60 prominent Australian statisticians in the Significance magazine.

My research interests are:

I speak English, Japanese (conversational) and R (base + tidyverse) fluently. I’ve lived in Australia almost all of my life (+-10 years standard deviation) and my university major was mathematics and statistics. Most of my code written during my PhD was in Python and Bash (both of which I am rusty now). I also like to dabble on front-end web development (HTML/CSS/JS). I’ve developed web apps using Shiny and practice computational reproducibility using Git, R Markdown (now Quarto) and internal DSLs (e.g. targets and renv R-packages). I’m a very data-oriented person to the extent that I’ve collected my own data via webscrapping and API. I adapt quickly and am quite open to taking new challenges – occasionally, I do text analysis and play in machine learning competitions.

I am a big advocate of open science and an avid research software engineer. My code are mostly available on my GitHub profile where I also host a number of R-packages that I have developed.

Contact

statsgen
emitanaka@fosstodon.org
emitanaka
emi.tanaka@anu.edu.au
Australian National University
46 Sullivan’s Creek Road
R. N. Robertson Building Room S307
Acton, ACT 2601
Australia

Please note that I will not respond to emails if I cannot identify who you are (i.e. not anonymous and has affiliation).