We are pleased to announce that Mikael Jagan @jaganmn has joined the R Core Team.

He has been an active contributor to the R project for several years, reporting bugs and proposing bug fixes and enhancements. Further, he has been co-authoring/maintaining the important Matrix package and more recently lme4 and glmmTMB.

Previously working in Ben Bolker's group at McMaster, he is starting a new job as Research Software Engineer with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Sharing from Bluesky:

Today we're launching the Open Source for Science Fund, a new multi-donor philanthropic fund by Renaissance Philanthropy, seeded by Biohub and Wellcome Trust, with support from the Kavli Foundation and @researchsoft

https://os4science.org/news/open-source-for-science-fund-launch/

From imaging the universe to modeling life at the molecular scale, science is built on open source software maintained by scientific communities.

That infrastructure is systemically underfunded and not yet designed for AI-native use.

Our inaugural call, "Open Source for the Life Sciences," is seeking proposals from software maintainers whose work supports data-intensive research and AI-driven discovery in the life sciences.

Two tracks: up to $250K for domain-specific tools, up to $1M for foundational libraries.

If you build the tools science runs on, we want to hear from you. https://os4science.org

Today marks 50 years since John Chambers and Rick Becker presented a new project to colleagues at Bell Labs - an interactive environment that became the S language.

For more details, see the #RStats blog entry "S at 50":

https://blog.r-project.org/2026/05/05/s-at-50/index.html

Lorena Abad Crespo Award for Innovation in Spatial Data Science.

A year ago, we lost a friend. Today, we'd like to celebrate her life and what she stood for. This award honours Lorena’s life, spirit, and contributions by recognising people who push open spatial data science forward.

Be part of the celebration and remember Lorena with us. Nominations are open until 31 May 2026. Self-nominations and nominations of others are welcome.

Details and nomination form: https://spatial-data-science.github.io/award.html