Welcome Joe Zhu

Hi pharmaverse community,

I wanted to share that Joe Zhu will be taking over from me (Ross Farrugia) as the Roche/Genentech representative on our pharmaverse council.

Having been one of the initial co-founders of pharmaverse back in mid-2020, it feels like the right time after 6 years to bring fresh perspectives and energy, and I couldn’t think of anyone better than Joe for this. I’m incredibly proud (as I hope all of our community are) of how far we’ve come doing our bit to bring countless companies and individuals together to make open source collaborations a reality across pharma.

In our early years, I had the privilege to present in front of a distinguished board and someone there challenged me with “good luck in getting pharmaceutical companies to share code”, in reply I shared the story of admiral and pharmaverse, and they were blown away. In all their years of experience they had never imagined something like this would ever succeed at scale. It is testament to every single one of you in our community (and thanks to supporters like PHUSE) that it has and it continues to grow!

I won’t be going far away, as now I get to continue as an individual contributor to pharmaverse.

Here’s some more details on Joe and where you can learn more about our council:

Bio:

Joe Zhu is a Principal Data Scientist at Roche and the Chief Product Owner and Lead Engineer for the company’s NEST project. A prominent advocate for open-source software in the global pharmaceutical sector, Joe co-founded both the China Pharma R User Group (Pharmarug) and R in Pharma APAC. He is dedicated to bridging the gap between advanced statistics, genomics research, and clinical trial software.

To learn more about our council please check our site page, and you can reach this group anytime using: pharmaverse.council@phuse.global.

@online{farrugia2026,
  author = {Farrugia, Ross},
  title = {Welcome {Joe} {Zhu}},
  date = {2026-06-04},
  url = {https://pharmaverse.github.io/blog/posts/2026-06-05-welcome-joe-zhu/welcome-joe-zhu.html},
  langid = {en}
}