David Spiegelhalter | |
---|---|
Born | David John Spiegelhalter 16 August 1953[3] |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater |
|
Awards |
|
Scientific career | |
Fields |
|
Institutions | |
Thesis | Adaptive inference using finite mixture models (1978) |
Doctoral advisor | Adrian Smith[2] |
Website | www |
Sir David John Spiegelhalter, OBE FRS (born 16 August 1953), is a British statistician and Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge[4] and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.[1][5][6][7] Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher.
Spiegelhalter attended Barnstaple Grammar School from 1963 to 1970 then studied at the University of Oxford (Bachelor of Arts 1974) and University College London. He gained his Master of Science 1975 and Doctor of Philosophy 1978, supervised by Adrian Smith.[2][8][9]
Spiegelhalter was research assistant in Brunel University in 1976[citation needed] and then visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, 1977–78. After his PhD, he was a research assistant for the Royal College of Physicians; he was based at the University of Nottingham, where his PhD supervisor, Adrian Smith, had been appointed a professor.
From 1981 he was at the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge. He has been an honorary lecturer at the University of Hong Kong since 1991. He has also been a consultant for GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and the World Anti-Doping Agency. He played a leading role in the public inquiries into children's heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the murders by Harold Shipman.[10]
Between 2007 and 2012 he divided his work[11] between the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory (three-fifths) and the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit (two-fifths).[12] He left the MRC in March 2012[13] and now works full-time at the Statistical Laboratory as the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk.
In 2012, Spiegelhalter hosted the BBC Four documentary Tails You Win: The Science of Chance which described the application of probability in everyday life.[14] He also presented a 2013 Cambridge Science Festival talk, How to Spot a Shabby Statistic at the Babbage Lecture Theatre in Cambridge.[7][15]
He has been elected as President of the Royal Statistical Society, and will take up the position on 1 January 2017.
Spiegelhalter's research interests are in statistics[1][16][17] including
Spiegelhalter was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to statistics.[29][30]