Three open source programming languages form a canon of sorts for the emerging field of data science: Python for general computation; Hadoop for managing massive unstructured data; and R for statistical analysis. Funds from this grant support efforts by Karthik Ram, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, to expand and strengthen the R community through the development of products aimed at lowering the barriers to the use of R. Ram has developed an R software module, for instance, that greatly simplifies the process of gathering data from archives and services commonly accessed by scientists, like Dryad, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Ram’s module thus obviates the need for scientists to write their own idiosyncratic code to parse data from such repositories. Grant funds will support the further development of R modules by Ram and his team, as well as outreach efforts to the scientific community to provide training and speed adoption of the new tools.