Roger Simon Bivand (born 5 April 1951) is a British geographer, economist and professor at the Norwegian School of Economics. He specialises in open source software for spatial analysis, and played a major role in developing functions for spatial data in the R statistical programming language, including the R packages sp, rgdal, maptools and rgrass7. His book Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R (2008), coauthored with Edzer Pebesma and Virgilio Gómez-Rubio, is considered "the authoritative resource on R's spatial capabilities".
Education and career
Bivand was born in Bristol on 5 April 1951. He studied geography at the University of Cambridge and obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1975, with a thesis on the economic geography of Sogn og Fjordane in Norway. He went on to receive a habilitation from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in 1982.
Bivand joined the Norwegian School of Economics in 1988 and was appointed a professor in 1996. He has been an editor of several academic journals, including the Journal of Statistical Software, The R Journal, the Journal of Geographical Systems, Geographical Analysis and the Norwegian Journal of Geography. In 2018 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the OpenGeoHub Foundation.