Who Is Claus O. Wilke?

Updated

Claus O. Wilke is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in Molecular Evolution at The University of Texas at Austin. His site, clauswilke.com, is his personal homepage, where he collects his biography, blog posts, projects, talks, art, and contact information. The site is most useful if you want to understand his academic work, follow his writing on data visualization and R, or find his open-source books and packages. Note that the opinions on the site are his own and are not presented as the official position of The University of Texas at Austin.

Academic background

  • Current position: Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in Molecular Evolution, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • PhD: Theoretical Physics, University of Bochum, Germany.
  • Postdoctoral training: Biological physics in the lab of Chris Adami at Caltech.

Research and publication areas

Wilke has published extensively in:

  • Computational biology
  • Molecular evolution
  • Protein biochemistry
  • Virology

Work in R and data visualization

Beyond his biology research, Wilke is known in the R community as the author of several popular data visualization packages, including cowplot, ggridges, and ggtext, and as a regular contributor to ggplot2. In 2019 he published Fundamentals of Data Visualization, a concise introduction to visualizing many different types of data sets.

What you can find on the site

Section What it contains
Biography Academic position, education, and research summary
Blog Posts on topics such as writing durable blogdown posts, doing PCA the tidyverse way, and site redesign notes
Projects Generative art, Fundamentals of Data Visualization, and blog posts collected into book-like form
Talks Selected presentations, including "Upping your Dataviz Game" and a talk on the ggtext package
Art Visual art created by mathematics and randomness
Contact Contact information, plus high-resolution head shots

When this page is the right source

Use clauswilke.com if you need his official biography, links to his R packages and book, or his talks and blog archive. If you are looking for the Fundamentals of Data Visualization content itself, the site points to it as an open-source book written entirely in R Markdown; if you want to cite his academic work, the biography and publication areas above give you the correct affiliation and field.