A personal update

I am a PhD student in Economics in the final year of my program. Over the past year, a combination of health and funding problems has created a serious financial gap.

While studying in Canada, I fell on the ice on my way to class. After a short hospitalization and months of paperwork, I was left responsible for a medical bill of about US$12,000. In part, I fell on the ice because I have arthritis, and besides needing a walking cane, it affects my typing and mobility. This limits the physical and part-time work I can take on. Surgeries, physiotherapy, and other medical expenses related to arthritis also used the savings I had brought from Chile.

My previous scholarship funding is still delayed, which was one of the reasons I switched programs and moved to the UK. My current UK funding was already limited, and it has since reduced because of UK science cuts. Together with the closure of the programs I would normally apply for in Chile, this has made the situation worse. After international tuition and living expenses, my university funding leaves too little each month to reliably cover rent. I am doing tutorials and other work, but I am still struggling to pay rent besides accumulating more debt. I now need to balance finishing my thesis with reduced funding and medical debt.

For the second year in a row, Becas Chile, Chile’s international study scholarship program, is closed. After recent cuts, available funding has been prioritized for domestic studies only. The reason for this is reflected in a recent audit which shows that around 15% of those awarded scholarships since 2008 had not fulfilled their return or retribution obligations. This represents a very large outstanding debt to the Chilean state, and it shows a collective-action problem where decisions that may be rational for individuals can undermine the program as a whole.

I would have accepted returning to Chile, completing the required retribution, and then deciding freely what to do next. However, that option is no longer available to me: the relevant programs were closed when I needed to apply, and the funding and timing arrangements that would have made that path possible are gone. This is why I am looking for work that I can do from the UK and within my visa conditions.

I am sharing this context not to ask anyone to solve my personal situation, but to explain why I am looking for sustainable ways to continue working.

Open source has been my way to contribute

I have been using R for elevent years now. For the past eight years, I have contributed to the R ecosystem, which is something important to me as it lets me contribute meaningfully even when my mobility makes other kinds of work difficult.

Some of my projects include:

• Chilemapas, an R package to create administrative maps of Chile.
• D3po, a fully open source alternative to Highcharts for R. Its JavaScript and D3 core also work without R.
• Tradepolicy, an e-book and software project that ports the examples from An Advanced Guide to Trade Policy Analysis.
• Capybara, which brings together R and Stata approaches to estimate models with many fixed effects.
• R GUI 2: A simple GUI for R that puts accessibility first (e.g., works well with typing assistants and screen readers).
• Tabler for R: An alternative to Shiny (in progress) that offers multi-user and multi-session without ties to a specific server/cloud provider or database engine.

I have also contributed to pointblank, usethis, base R, and the Spanish translation of a large portion of R for Data Science.

I care deeply about keeping this work open and useful. Many of these projects exist because people told me about a gap in the R ecosystem or detected gaps myself and others suggested improvements.

What I am looking for

I am actively looking for projects where I can contribute writing code, maintaining packages, technical writer, or working as a research assistant. I am especially interested in data analysis, reproducible research, econometrics, and improving or maintaining existing open source software.

Finding projects has also become harder over the past year as more organizations have adopted AI-based tools. I have worked on a few small projects where I was asked to diagnose or repair problems caused by careless AI uses, but those opportunities have been limited. I am therefore reaching out directly for projects where my experience can be useful.

Because of my visa conditions, I need to keep paid work within the permitted limit of 20 hours per week. I am therefore looking for well-scoped collaborations, part-time contracts, and projects that can fit within that limit. If you need help with an R package, data workflow, documentation, or a research tool, please email me.

Besides R, I have a solid understanding of C++, Python and SQL.

Supporting my work

I have enabled GitHub Sponsors for people who have found my packages, writing, or contributions useful and would like to help sustain them.

If my work has saved you time, helped with a research project, or made an open source tool more useful, please consider sponsoring me. A small recurring contribution helps create time for maintenance, documentation, bug fixes, and new features. All of those help me to keep the results freely available to everyone.

If financial support is not possible, sharing this post, reporting issues, suggesting improvements, or connecting me with a suitable project is also genuinely helpful. Open source depends on many forms of participation.

Thank you to everyone who has used my work, sent feedback, opened an issue, contributed a patch, or encouraged me along the way. I am grateful for the community around these projects, and I hope to keep contributing to it for many years.

I have also written books about plotting, optimization, and econometrics: