November 11, 2026
Hadley Wickham, chief scientist at Posit PBC, will accept Dickinson’s Joseph Priestley Award and deliver the lecture “y code when ai?”
The ceremony and lecture will take place at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 11, in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 360 W. Louther St. The event is free and open to the public. The lecture will also be livestreamed and available via a link at clarkeforum.org.
Wickham will discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) has irreversibly changed software engineering and data science. Because of the proliferation of AI tools, ideas data scientists could once only dream about are now not only possible but easy to execute, and the practice of typing code line by line may be going extinct. However, Wickham will argue, learning to code is learning to reason, and there is no better time than the present to learn how to code.
At Posit PBC, an open-source software company, Wickham builds computational and cognitive tools to make data science easier and faster. He is known for his work on data-science-tool packages like the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr and tidyr. He is also known for his work on principled software-development tools, such as roxygen2, testthat and pkgdown. He won the COPSS Presidents’ Award in 2019 and is a member of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. A writer, educator and speaker, Wickham promotes the use of R, a programming language.
The Joseph Priestley Award is presented by Dickinson College in memory of Joseph Priestley, known as the discoverer of oxygen, to a distinguished scientist whose work has contributed to the welfare of humanity. The award, first presented in 1952, recognizes outstanding achievement and contribution to the understanding of science and the world.
This event is supported by the Priestley Fund and is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by Dickinson College’s biology, chemistry, data analytics, environmental studies, geosciences, mathematics & computer science, physics & astronomy and psychology departments. For additional information, please visit clarkeforum.org or email clarkeforum@dickinson.edu.
Further information
- Location: Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium
- Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Cost: Free