Welcome to the course. I'm Roger Pang, a professor of biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bluebrook School of Health. >> I'm Brooke Anderson, an assistant professor of environmental epidemiology at Colorado State University. >> So I'm really excited to teach this course because R has become just incredibly popular, and it's basically the defacto language for doing really sophisticated data analyses. But in addition to being a language for data analysis, it's also this incredible platform for building tools to kind of make your data analyses more efficient and for kind of sharing your work with other people. >> That's right. In this course, we're going to start off by giving people a tour of the R environment. But then, we dig deeper into how to take your code and put it into functions, and then to wrap those functions into packages. And also, how to create data visualization. >> Right, so I think in this first course, we're going to talk specifically about kind of the grammar and the syntax of R. We're going to talk about tools that are available for getting and cleaning data, and kind of doing little data analyses. And then we're going to talk about a bunch of other tools that are going to be useful for as you kind of progress through the specialization, building packages and writing functions. >> Yeah, this course, we move kind of quickly through the basics of R. So I think it's probably best for somebody either who has some R experience before, or somebody who's coming in knowing how to program in another programming language. >> Right, and so, just a little bit more about us. So, I'm a professor here at Johns Hopkins. My research focus is primarily on developing statistical methods for environmental health problems, and I'm particularly interested in looking at the health effects of indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure. >> I study in environmental epidemiology and do a lot of work looking into the health impacts of different climate-related disasters, including heat waves and hurricanes. >> So, we're really excited to teach this course, and we're just really looking forward to seeing what you can build.