R Computing Lab

About

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

I’m S. Mason Garrison, Associate Professor of Quantitative Psychology at Wake Forest University and Director of the R Computing Lab. I earned my Ph.D. in Quantitative Methods from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, advised by Joseph L. Rodgers.

My research develops genetically-informed research designs — sibling comparisons, discordant kinship models, and extended pedigree methods — for studying individual differences, health inequities, and socioeconomic disparities without requiring twin samples. A lot of that work lives in R packages I build and maintain (see the Software page), and I write about the R side of that work here.

Publications

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

A few highlights. For the complete, up-to-date list, see the full CV (PDF).

Software papers

Garrison, S. M. (2026). ggpedigree: Visualizing Pedigrees with ‘ggplot2’ and ‘plotly’. Journal of Open Source Software, 11(118), 9434.
Garrison, S. M., Hunter, M., Lyu, X., Trattner, J., & Burt, S. A. (2024). BGmisc: An R Package for Extended Behavior Genetics Analysis. Journal of Open Source Software, 9(94), 6203.

Selected papers

Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., … Garrison, S. M., … Nosek, B. (2026). Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences. Nature, 652, 135–142.
Burt, S. A., Garrison, S. M., Lyu, X., Rodgers, J. L., Carroll, S. L., Smith, K. R., & Hunter, M. D. (2025). Contributions of inherited mtDNA to longevity: evidence from extended pedigrees with 176 million kinship pairs. eBioMedicine.
Lyu, X., Hunter, M. D., Burt, S. A., Good, R., Carroll, S. L., & Garrison, S. M. (2025). Detecting mtDNA Effects with an Extended Pedigree Model. Behavior Genetics. — Editors’ Choice Award, Best Paper in Volume 55.
Garrison, S. M. & Rodgers, J. L. (2019). Decomposing the Causes of the Socioeconomic Status-Health Gradient with Biometrical Modeling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(6), 1030–1047.
Jackson, J. J., Connolly, J. J., Garrison, S. M., Leveille, M., & Connolly, S. L. (2015). Your friends know how long you will live: A 75-year study of peer-rated personality traits. Psychological Science, 26(3), 335-340.

Book

Garrison, S. M. (2021–present). Data Science for Psychologists. Free, open-source multimedia textbook written in R about R.

Software

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

R packages developed and maintained by the R Computing Lab, mostly built around genetically-informed research designs — pedigrees, kinship, and family-based models — without requiring twin samples.

Maintainer

ggpedigree — Visualizing pedigrees with ggplot2 and plotly.
BGmisc — Extended behavior genetics analysis: relatedness, pedigree construction, and variance component tools.
discord — Functions for discordant kinship (sibling/cousin comparison) modeling.
NlsyLinks — Utilities and kinship links for research with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY).

Contributor

ACEsimFit — ACE kin-pair data simulation and model fitting.

Bug reports and contributions are welcome on each package’s GitHub repo, linked from its CRAN page above.

Welcome to the R Computing Lab Blog

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

It’s official! 😁 I have tenure now (as of July 1st), and I want to start writing more about the R side of my work. It’s the part of my research that I enjoy the most, and I want to share it with others. Heck, I even named my lab the R Computing Lab… This blog is a place for me to write about the R packages I maintain, the methods I develop, and the reproducible research practices I use.