Matt Lyon studied his Zoology BSc at the University of Liverpool. His degree included quantitative biology modules which used several statistical data packages. He started his career at The Francis Crick Institute in London as an Animal Technician before progressing to CRUK Manchester and finally moved to AstraZeneca in 2020 as an In-Vivo Scientist.
Matt is currently the Global Head and his departments’ representative for Inclusion and Diversity (I&D).He also heads up a small, international cross functional team which focusses on creating and rolling out initiatives across the department. This also includes liaising with other areas of the business to promote AZ as a great place to work.
Matt has taken over the Lead of the Steering Committee of the community of R users at AstraZeneca- ‘R@AZ’ – which currently has around 1600 members. Building on his I&D and quantitative biology skills, he is looking at expanding this community within AZ and beyond.

Ari is a Principal Statistical Programmer and International Lead Programmer at Novo Nordisk with a seat on the pharmaverse council. He is a driving force behind the adoption of R in clinical deliverables and submissions at Novo Nordisk. Ari is also the author and maintainer of multiple R packages used in the Novo Nordisk ecosystem.

Daniel Sabanes Bove studied Statistics in LMU Munich and obtained his PhD at the University of Zurich for his research work on Bayesian model selection. He started his career in 2013 at Roche as a biostatistician, then worked at Google as a data scientist from 2018 to 2020 before rejoining Roche. He currently leads the Statistical Engineering team in Roche Pharma Product Development that works on productionizing R packages, Shiny modules and how-to templates for data scientists. Daniel is co-author of multiple R packages published on CRAN and Bioconductor, as well as the book "Likelihood and Bayesian Inference: With Applications in Biology and Medicine", and is currently openstatsware.org (ASA BIOP working group on Software Engineering).