Employment

I used to work as a Senior University Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. After my retirement I continue involved in research at the same univeristy, at the Natural Resources Institute Finland and at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Nowadays, I teach occasionally in courses and regularly advice doctoral students and contibute to research projects.

Experience

The subject of my research is how plants gather information from their environment and use it to thrive and survive in a difficult to predict environment. I have also taught and regularly advice on the design of experiments, data analysis and data visualization.

I have been using TeX and LaTeX since around 1987, initially mostly for literate programming in Modula-2 with MWEB and later for typesetting books, a scientific journal, mansucripts and teaching materials. I have used different programming languages (BASIC, Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++, Java, Fortran, 6800 and 8086 assembler), scripting languages (AWK, Perl, Ruby) and graphical programming systems (Stella, Simile, FlowStone).

I currently use Git. I used RCS for many years and later CVS and SVN, each for a short time, before switching to Git.

I have been using R since around 1998 and teaching R courses for MSc and PhD students since 2001. I have experience in the design and coding of R packages and their documentation.

I have developed open software and open hardware for use in different aspects of my lab's research in plant science and solar radiation.

R Book

I have written the book Learn R: As a Language, 2ed published in 2024 in CRC's The R Series. ISBN 9781032516998.

R Packages

Of the R packages I have published in CRAN, three implementing extensions to 'ggplot2', called 'ggpmisc', 'ggpp' and 'ggpinnards' are currently the most popular.

I have developed a suite of R packages for photobiology supporting reproducibility in handling of spectral data, but also including functions such as astronomical calculations related to the position of the sun, day and night length, and water content in the atmosphere and evapotranspiration. Three packages contain collections of spectral transmission data for optical filters, and emission spectra for many different LEDs and lamp types. These packaes are available through CRAN. Sources are at GitHub.

Memberships

I am a member of the Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS), the Dataviz society, the TeX Users' Group (TUG) and a former member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). I am a member of the managing group of the UV4Plants Association.