About Us

About Us

Stan is freedom-respecting, open-source software (new BSD core, some interfaces GPLv3) for facilitating statistical inference at the frontiers of applied statistics.

The Stan Development Team

The project is a team effort comprised of full time and volunteer developers from around the world.

Funding

Stan would not exist or continue to exist without the generous support of grants, foundations, and sponsors.

If you are interested in supporting the development of Stan then please see our support page detailing the ways in which you can contribute.

Stan Logo

The Stan name and logo are registered trademarks of NumFOCUS under the direction of the Stan Governing Body. For details on when you can use the logo see

Citing Stan

We appreciate citations for the Stan software because it lets us find out what people have been doing with Stan and motivate further grant funding. See How to Cite Stan for more details.

NumFOCUS

Stan is now linked to NumFOCUS, a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that serves several other open-source software projects, including NumPy, Julia, Jupyter, and others.

The mission of NumFOCUS is to promote sustainable high-level programming languages, open code development, and reproducible scientific research. We accomplish this mission through our educational programs and events as well as through fiscal sponsorship of open source data science projects. We aim to increase collaboration and communication within the scientific computing community.

quoted from the NumFOCUS home page

Stan Governing Body (SGB)

The Stan Governing Body provides project governance structure in accord with the NumFOCUS requirements and is the liaison between the project and NumFOCUS for all fiscally sponsored initiatives. The SGB has authority over:

  • ownership and management of trademarks
  • online resources including the Stan Discourse, the stan-dev GitHub organization
  • NumFOCUS funds
  • fundraising in support of Stan
  • authorizing and/or running Stan conferences
  • licensing requirements for contributed code and documentation

The SGB is intended to be a transparent body in service of the Stan community and electorate. It is committed to improving inclusion and diversity at all levels of the Stan project.

To reach the current SGB with any questions, concerns, or feedback, please email board@mc-stan.org.

The current SGB members are:

  • Vianey Leos Barajas (University of Toronto)
  • Caetano Souto Maior (National Institutes of Health)
  • Charles Margossian (Flatiron Institute)
  • Simon Maskell (University of Liverpool)
  • Mitzi Morris (Columbia University)