The R Validation Hub recently had its community meeting after a brief hiatus. The team discussed announcements, common challenges, and brainstormed ideas for possible future projects through the R Validation Hub. Here are some highlights of their meeting. Stay tuned for the next monthly community meeting, dates to be announced!
📢 Announcements
We have some announcements about R Val Hub leadership and structure! Doug Kelkhoff, Principal Data Scientist / Statistical Software Engineer at Roche, will be taking over the R Validation lead role from Andy Nicholls.
![](https://www.r-consortium.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/07/Doug.jpeg)
Doug Kelkhoff has been supporting the adoption of R in the pharmaceutical space for the past 6 years. During his time at Roche, he has pushed the adoption of R through pilot clinical trials, showcasing the benefits of using R by crafting internal tools and building services that embed the R Validation Hub’s guidance as part of our software development lifecycle. He is passionate about making the use of open source tools in a regulated setting a viable path not just for large pharmaceutical companies, but for lean startups and the public sector by addressing challenges through open initiatives. We welcome Doug as the new lead!
![](https://www.r-consortium.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2022/06/andy_nicholls_profile-1-768x793-1.jpg)
Andy Nicholls, Senior Director, Head of Data Science at GSK, has been the lead of the R Validation team for over four years. He has greatly contributed to the working group, including his work with the R Adoption Series, presenting eight recent case studies covering how the R Validation Hub guidance is being put into practice across many of our industry partners. These case studies covered building a Gxp framework with R: https://www.pharmar.org/casestudies/
Thank you, Andy, for the contributions and leadership you brought to the R Validation Hub! 🏅
Interested in supporting the R Validation Hub with its communication workstream? We need volunteers to help us with improving consistency with branding, communication channels, and year-long planning, contact us: https://www.pharmar.org/contact/
Call To Action for the Community 👋
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During the community meeting, the team had discussions about how people use the riskmetric package for their evaluation processes and what they deem as too high-risk scores.
💬 Continue the conversation and participate in this riskmetric survey: https://bit.ly/risk_survey
Other Topics Covered During the Discussion Rounds
💡 CDISC data should be the standard for add-on unit testing, a common repo from the R Validation Hub would be very welcome.
💡 Finally, we discussed who reviews R packages, including what is the role of software engineers, statisticians, and clinical experts. Join us in the next meeting to share your thoughts!
Check out the Meeting Slides
Additional Resources
- R Validation website: https://www.pharmar.org/
- Github repo with contributions: https://github.com/pharmaR/case_studies