David Spiegelhalter - Biography

David John Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS, (16 August 1953–) is a distinguished British statistician. In 2007 he was elected Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He divides his work between the Statistical Laboratory (three fifths) and the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit (two fifths). Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher and is the 34th most-cited mathematical scientist in the world over the last ten years .

Education

Spiegelhalter studied at the University of Oxford (Bachelor of Arts 1974) and University College London (Master of Science 1975, PhD 1978; supervised by Adrian Smith ).

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 PhD 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, 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.

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

Research interests

• Bayesian approach to clinical trials, expert systems and complex modelling and epidemiology.
• Graphical models of conditional independence. He wrote several papers in the 1980s that showed how probability could be incorporated into expert systems, a problem that seemed intractable at the time. Spiegelhalter showed that while frequentist probability did not lend itself to expert systems, Bayesian probability most certainly did.

• Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. In the 1990s Spiegelhalter led the Medical Research Council team that developed BUGS, a general-purpose statistical program for computing non-conjugate multi-level models using the newly discovered MCMC methods. At the time, this was the only general purpose software for non-conjugate Bayesian inference and it was crucial to the explosive growth of Bayesian analysis that occurred at this time.
• General issues in clinical trials, including cluster randomisation, meta-analysis and ethical monitoring.
• Monitoring and comparing clinical and public health outcomes and their associated publication as performance indicators.
• Public understanding of risk, including promoting concepts such as the micromort (a one in a million chance of death). Media reporting of statistics, risk and probability and the wider conception of uncertainty as going beyond what is measured to model uncertainty, the unknown and the unmeasurable.

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
• 2009 Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal