R core team wins €100,000 Rousseeuw Prize

The R Core team was awarded the 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics on June 17, 2026, receiving a €100,000 cash award and a bronze medal for their contributions to statistical computing [Rousseeuw Prize]. The prize citation highlights three pillars of the team’s impact: (1) the continued evolution of the R language since its 1993 release, (2) the maintenance of CRAN, which now hosts over 19,000 packages and processes more than 1.2 billion downloads per month [Rousseeuw Prize], and (3) the promotion of reproducible research through the tidyverse and R Markdown ecosystems. The award ceremony, held in Leuven, Belgium, was attended by the prize committee, the R Consortium, and representatives from major data-science firms that rely on R [Lobsters]. The €100,000 prize fund will be split among the core maintainers, providing a rare monetary incentive. This award offers concrete proof that R remains a dominant platform for applied statistics, especially in regulated sectors such as pharma and finance where auditability is paramount. The Rousseeuw Prize recognizes the team's decade-long stewardship of the R language and ecosystem, demonstrating that sustained, volunteer-driven engineering can earn recognition in the field of statistics.