David Spiegelhalter

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David John Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS, (16 August 1953 -) is a statistician. He is now Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge (60%), while continuing to work at the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge (40%). Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher placing him in the top 250 most cited scientists in the world over the last ten years.

Contents 1 Education 2 Career 3 Research interests 4 Honours

[edit] Education

Spiegelhalter studied at the University of Oxford (BA 1974) and University College London (MSc 1975, PhD 1978; his PhD supervisor was Adrian Smith).

[edit] Career

Spiegelhalter was research assistant in Brunel University in 1976 and then visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, 1977-8. After his PhD, he was a research assistant for the Royal College of Physicians; he was based at the University of Nottingham, where his supervisor, Adrian Smith, had been appointed a professor.

Since 1981, he has been 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 and Novartis. He played a leading role in the public inquiries into Bristol heart surgery and the murders by Harold Shipman.

His main interests outside work are his stained glass work, samba drumming and treks in various parts of the world.

[edit] Research interests

• Bayesian approach to clinical trials, expert systems and complex modelling and epidemiology.
• Graphical models of conditional independence.
• Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
• General issues in clinical trials, including cluster randomisation, meta-analysis and ethical monitoring.
• Monitoring and comparing clinical and public health outcomes.

[edit] Honours

• 1975 Fellow, Royal Statistical Society
• 1985 Guy Medal in Bronze, Royal Statistical Society
• 1989 Award for Outstanding Application Paper, American Statistical Association
• 1993 Chartered Statistician, Royal Statistical Society
• 1994 Guy Medal in Silver, Royal Statistical Society
• 1994 Honorary Doctorate, University of Aalborg, Denmark
• 2005 Fellow, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London
• 2006 Received an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours
• 2006 Appointed Honorary Professor of Biostatistics at University of Cambridge