Remembering Lex Jansen: Friend to SAS learners everywhere

For many SAS users, lexjansen.com was simply a destination. It was the place you went when you needed to find that paper you vaguely remembered from a conference years ago, track down an expert's presentation on a niche topic, or discover the best work that had ever been published on a particular SAS technique. It was fast, comprehensive, and effective.

What many people didn't realize was that Lex Jansen was a real person.

We learned the sad news this week that Lex passed away. And his site, which has helped thousands of SAS users over the decades, is now gone. These are two huge losses for the global community of SAS users.

His passion project: make information accessible

Lex built and maintained lexjansen.com, a personal, not-for-profit project that became one of the most valuable resources in the SAS ecosystem. The site indexes tens of thousands of papers from SAS Global Forum, PharmaSUG, PHUSE, regional user groups, and countless other conferences, providing a powerful search experience across decades of technical knowledge.

That's perhaps one of the highest compliments a technical contributor can receive. Lex built something so useful, so dependable, and so enduring that it became infrastructure. His work quietly enabled the success of thousands of others.

Before modern search engines became as capable as they are today, lexjansen.com set the standard for finding relevant technical content. Even now, many experienced SAS professionals will instinctively type their search terms into Lex's site before trying anything else. The site's carefully curated indexing and search capabilities often made it easier to find the right paper than searching the conference websites themselves.

For countless users, "Lex Jansen" became synonymous with the site itself. Many learned how to use lexjansen.com long before they ever learned there was a person behind it. Some never knew at all.

Stalwart contributor to clinical data standards and the pharma industry

Throughout his career, Lex had many "day jobs" aside from building his website for SAS users. He worked on methods and data formats for clinical data and pharmaceutical submission standards, including CDISC and Define-XML. After years of prior experience in the industry, Lex joined SAS and worked on offerings such as SAS Clinical Standards Toolkit and SAS Life Science Analytics Framework. He later retired from SAS, but went to work for CDISC where he continued his work toward improving the data standards process and helping others in the industry to learn. (See this remembrance from his CDISC colleagues.) All the while, he continued to add content and index rules to lexjansen.com, so SAS users could always find the latest and best published information.

A personal remembrance

Like many people, I knew lexjansen the site long before I met Lex Jansen the person. I got to know him just a little bit during his time at SAS and during the annual PharmaSUG conference, where we could meet up in person. Since my team at SAS curates the content from SAS conferences, I worked with Lex to get that content indexed for his site. Most recently he added the content for SAS Innovate 2026. He was a super nice and approachable colleague and friend, and always very responsive to every request.

On a personal level, we recently compared photos from our respective trips to Iceland. Lex traveled there in June 2026, whereas I had been there in March. We both found it to be a beautiful country with amazing history and culture, but our climate experiences were very different! My trip was during Winter; Lex was there in the Spring.

An iconic waterfall in Iceland over a 3-month span

Living in a world without lexjansen.com

The loss of Lex's site is a setback for SAS users -- but we still have access to the decades of content that the site made easy to search and find.

The goal of lexjansen.com was to index all of this published SAS content to make it easily searchable. But most of the actual published papers are hosted elsewhere. For example, you can find links to all SUGI/SAS Global Forum/SAS Innovate sessions here.

PharmaSUG proceedings are at the PharmaSUG site: https://pharmasug.org/past-conference-proceedings/

Many of the other regional/large conferences are also self-hosting their papers. Over time, I know the community will come together to fill the gap left by Lex, inspired by Lex's work and his acts of service for us all.

Remembering Lex Jansen: Friend to SAS learners everywhere was published on SAS Users.