skip to content

MRC Biostatistics Unit

Summary

Sylvia Richardson CBE FMedSci is Emeritus Director at the MRC Biostatistics Unit, leading the Unit from 2012 to 2021. Sylvia also held a Research Professorship at the University of Cambridge between 2012 and 2023.

Before joining the BSU, Sylvia held the Chair of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Imperial College London since 2000 and was formerly Directeur de Recherches at the French National Institute for Medical Research INSERM, where she held research positions for 20 years. In 2019, Sylvia was awarded Commander of the Most Excellent Order British Empire (CBE). Sylvia has also been awarded the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis

Sylvia has worked extensively in many areas of biostatistics research and made important contributions to the statistical modelling of complex biomedical data, in particular from a Bayesian perspective. Her work has contributed to progress in epidemiological understanding and has covered spatial modelling and disease mapping, measurement error problems, mixture and clustering models as well as integrative analysis of observational data from different sources. Her recent research has focused on modelling and analysis of large data problems such as those arising in genomics. She is particularly interested in developing new analytical strategies for integrative and translational genomics, including statistical methodology for risk stratification, discovering disease subtypes, and large scale hierarchical analysis of high dimensional biomedical and multi-omics data.

Sylvia was the President of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) between 2021 and 2023 - the fifth woman to become president in the Society’s 187-year history. Sylvia also founded and co‐chaired the RSS Covid‐19 Task Force, which engaged a network of RSS members during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sylvia was awarded the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society in Silver in 2009, and is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Sylvia was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to medical statistics.

Google Scholar

ORCID