The founder of RLadies

Gabriela de Queiroz is a Sr. Developer Advocate/Sr. Engineering & Data Science Manager at IBM where she leads the CODAIT Machine Learning Team. She is the founder of R-Ladies, a worldwide organization for promoting diversity in the R community with more than 150 chapters in 45+ countries.

October’s role model engineer

This week week I am featuring Gabriela de Queiroz as a role model for women engineers. She’s currently a data scientist at IBM but she wasn’t always in this role. We all have a beginning.

Building an R community

When she moved to the US in 2012 and learnt a lot in the open source community. After learning from them, she decided to give back teaching what she knew best: R programming. Gabriela explains:

The idea was to create a place where I could see myself in the audience. Where I could feel safe and without any judgements. Where I could ask questions and learn and share with others.

This is how RLadies was born.

Today, RLadies is a world-wide organization that promotes gender diversity in the R community. They have 138 chapters in 44 countries. Rladies focuses on increasing the minority gender representation in the R community, supports them to achieve their programming potential, helps them build a network of R leaders and, facilitates individual and collective progress world-wide.

An engineering leader

Gabriela didn’t stop there. She is continiuosly giving back by participating in conferences and panels. The topics include: diversity, deep learning, data science, being a manager and a parent!

If you want to be close to a phenomenal leader like Gabriela, follow her on:

If you want to be part of RLadies, you can find them on:


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