The R Consortium is pleased to announce that James “JD” Long, CTO at Palomar, a specialty insurance company serving residential and commercial clients in five product categories: Earthquake, Inland Marine and Other Property, Casualty, Fronting and Crop - and co-author of R Cookbook: Proven Recipes for Data Analysis, Statistics, and Graphics, will deliver the keynote address at R!sk 2026, an online conference taking place February 18–19, 2026.
👉 R!sk 2026 is not just for insurance companies. It is for any domain that uses R to model, measure, and manage risk.
R!sk 2026 is a new R Consortium event focused on how the R ecosystem is used to model, measure, and manage risk. The conference will be fully online and scheduled on US Eastern Time, with talks recorded and speakers participating in live Q&A.
About JD Long
JD Long is CTO at Palomar, He says “I’m the guy who can build a Monte Carlo model, help parallelize the model to run on cloud services and then stand in front of a group of business leaders and put the work in context where everyone understands. My super power is thinking probabilistically, understanding risk, and communicating clearly.”
JD is widely known in the R community for his practical focus on building real-world risk and insurance models and for helping large organizations adopt R and modern analytics practices. He is a frequent speaker at R conferences and meetups, and his work has been featured in the R Journal and other publications.
As co-author of R Cookbook: Proven Recipes for Data Analysis, Statistics, and Graphics, JD has helped thousands of R users solve everyday data and modeling problems. Through his talks and writing, he emphasizes probabilistic thinking, clear communication of uncertainty, and building analytics cultures that support experimentation and learning.
About R!sk 2026
Dates: February 18–19, 2026
Format: 100% online
Focus: Using R to calculate, measure, report, and mitigate risk. NOT JUST IN INSURANCE BUT IN ANY DOMAIN.
Domains: financial risk, insurance, credit, operational risk, climate, healthcare, and more
Host: R Consortium
The Call for Proposals is open through December 7, 2025. If you use R for risk modeling, reporting, or governance in any domain, you are encouraged to submit a proposal and help shape the inaugural R!sk 2026 program.
More information, the Call for Proposals is available on the R!sk 2026 website: