We are delighted to announce that the Director of MRC Biostatistics Unit- Professor Sylvia Richardson has been nominated as the next Royal Statistical Society president after Deborah Ashby’s term of office comes to a close at the end of 2020.

Sylvia was chosen from a list of nominees put forward by RSS fellows to the Society’s President Nominating Committee and recommended to Council, which endorsed the nomination at the end of March.

“I am delighted to have been nominated as the RSS President elect and am honoured to be following in the footsteps of other distinguished statisticians in taking up this role”

Sylvia is has been Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge since 2012, and her recent research has focused on modelling and analysis of large data problems such as those arising in genomics. Before this, she was chair of biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Imperial College London since 2000 and former directeur de recherches at the French National Institute for Medical Research INSERM.

She has been a recipient of the RSS Guy medal in silver (2009), the Suffrage Science Award in Maths and Computing and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award. She is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the International Society for Bayesian Analysis and the Academy of Medical Sciences. An RSS fellow since 1979, Sylvia was a member of the RSS Research Section from 1995 to 1998, member of Council from 1998 to 2002 as well as chair of the Publication Review working party, helping in particular to launch the RSS flagship magazine, Significance. She has also been RSS Honorary Secretary, theme director for publications and member of the RSS executive council from 2003 to 2006.