Robert Clifford Gentleman (born 1959) is a Canadian statistician and bioinformatician[2] who is currently the founding executive director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School.

[9] Gentleman worked as a statistics professor at the University of Auckland in the mid-1990s, where he developed the R programming language alongside Ross Ihaka.

[5][10] In 2001, he started work on the Bioconductor project to promote the development of open-source tools for bioinformatics and computational biology.

In 2009, Gentleman joined the Genentech biotechnology corporation, where he worked as a senior director in bioinformatics and computational biology.

[10] Gentleman won the Benjamin Franklin Award in 2008, recognising his work on the R programming language, the Bioconductor project and his commitment to data and methods sharing.