John Chambers (statistician)

John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S.

Early life
Chambers received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto in 1963. He received a Master of Arts in 1965 and a PhD degree in 1966, both in statistics, from Harvard University.

Career
Chambers started at Bell Laboratories in 1966 as a member of its technical staff. From 1981 to 1983, he was the head of its Advanced Software Department and from 1983 to 1989 he was the head of its Statistics and Data Analysis Research Department. In 1989, he moved back to full-time research and in 1995, he became a distinguished member of the technical staff. In 1997, he was made the first Fellow of Bell Labs and was cited for "pioneering contributions to the field of statistical computing". He remained a distinguished member of the technical staff and a Fellow until his retirement from Bell Labs in 2005.

After retiring from Bell Labs, Chambers became a visiting professor at the University of Auckland, University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford University. Since 2008, he has been active at Stanford, currently serving as Senior Advisor of its data science program and an adjunct professor in Stanford's Department of Statistics.

Chambers is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Awards and accomplishments
Chambers has received the following awards:
 * 1998, awarded the ACM Software System Award for developing the S programming language. The award was presented on May 15, 1999.
 * 2004, awarded an honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo

John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award
Following his 1998 ACM Software System Award, Chambers donated his prize money (US$10,000) to the American Statistical Association to endow an award for novel statistical software, the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award.