Claus O. Wilke holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and he is currently the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in Molecular Evolution at The University of Texas at Austin. Wilke studies the evolution of viruses, and he has published nearly 200 scientific papers covering topics in computational biology, molecular evolution, protein biochemistry, and virology. He has also authored several popular R packages used for data visualization, such as cowplot and ggridges, and he is a contributor to the package ggplot2. In 2019, Wilke published the book Fundamentals of Data Visualization, which provides a concise introduction to effectively visualizing many different types of data sets.