Ian Ford [ FRSE FRCP(Glas) FSCT ] [1] is a professor of biostatistics and a director of the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics, and a former Dean of Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences, at the University of Glasgow.
Ford was born in Glasgow and educated at the former Hamilton Academy. He studied at the University of Glasgow, graduating with a BSc and in 1976, was awarded a PhD in Statistics. From 1976-77, he was visiting Lecturer to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and since then successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, Personal Professor and Professor at the University of Glasgow. [2] He is the first holder of the Chair of Biostatistics at the University. [3]
Ford has been the Director of the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics since 1991 [4] and Director of the Glasgow Clinical Trials Unit. He is also a member of the editorial boards for the international journals, Statistical Methods for Medical Research; [5] Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice [6] and Public Library of Science Medicine. [7] [8] He has written numerous papers. [9] [10] [11]
In 1999, Ford was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [12] He is also a Fellow of both the International Statistical Institute and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. [13] A member of the Cholesterol Triallists Collaboration and the Fibrinogen Studies Collaboration, Ford is also a member of the American Statistical Association; Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry; the Drug Information Association; the Royal Statistical Society; and the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics. [14]
From 2000–04, Ford served as Dean of the Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences, University of Glasgow.. [2]
The University of Glasgow is a public research university in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded by papal bull in 1451 [O.S. 1450], it is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Along with the universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, the university was part of the Scottish Enlightenment during the 18th century.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) is responsible for co-coordinating and funding medical research in the United Kingdom. It is part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), which came into operation 1 April 2018, and brings together the UK's seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England. UK Research and Innovation is answerable to, although politically independent from, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Sir David John Spiegelhalter is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher.
John Aitchison was a Scottish statistician.
Morag Crichton Timbury FRCPG FRCPath FRSE FRCP was a Scottish medical virologist, bacteriologist and science writer.
Leroy "Lee" CroninFRSE FRSC is the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and appointed to the Regius Chair of Chemistry in 2013. He was previously the Gardiner Chair, appointed April 2009. In 2022, Cronin was suspended for three months from the Royal Society of Chemistry for a breach of their code of conduct.
Medical statistics deals with applications of statistics to medicine and the health sciences, including epidemiology, public health, forensic medicine, and clinical research. Medical statistics has been a recognized branch of statistics in the United Kingdom for more than 40 years but the term has not come into general use in North America, where the wider term 'biostatistics' is more commonly used. However, "biostatistics" more commonly connotes all applications of statistics to biology. Medical statistics is a subdiscipline of statistics. "It is the science of summarizing, collecting, presenting and interpreting data in medical practice, and using them to estimate the magnitude of associations and test hypotheses. It has a central role in medical investigations. It not only provides a way of organizing information on a wider and more formal basis than relying on the exchange of anecdotes and personal experience, but also takes into account the intrinsic variation inherent in most biological processes."
The Robertson Centre for Biostatistics is a specialised biostatistical research centre in Glasgow, Scotland. It is part of the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences and the Institute of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Glasgow. All scales of research are carried out at the centre from multi-site clinical trials to small scale research projects. The centre also has interests in the development of novel informatics solutions for clinical research, statistical issues in epidemiology and health economic evaluation.
Michael J. G. Farthing is British emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, where he was previously its vice-chancellor (2007–2016). His early academic career was in medicine, specialising in gastroenterology.
Nan McKenzie Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health, Emerita in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.
Dame Anna Felicja Dominiczak DBE FRCP FRSE FAHA FMedSci is a Polish-born British medical researcher, Regius Professor of Medicine - the first woman to hold this position, and Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She was a non-executive member of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board. before stepping down and taking a secondment with the UK Government's Test and Trace programme. From 2013 to 2015, Dominiczak was president of the European Society of Hypertension.
Peter Boyle, FRSE FFPH FRCPS(Glas) FRCP(Edin) FMedSci, was a British epidemiologist. He conducted research on globalisation of cancer, where he showed the dramatic increase of cancer in low- and medium income countries.
Ian Robertson is a Scottish neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin.
Sheila Macdonald Bird OBE FRSE FMedSci is a Scottish biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and BMJ series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Bird's doctoral work on non-proportional hazards in breast cancer found application in organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance (WASH) studies in prisons. Her work with Cooper on UK dietary bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposure revealed that the 1940–69 birth cohort was the most exposed and implied age-dependency in susceptibility to clinical vCJD progression from dietary BSE exposure since most vCJD cases were younger, born in 1970–89. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep which revolutionised the understanding of scrapie.
Marvin Zelen was Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science. During the 1980s, Zelen chaired HSPH's Department of Biostatistics. Among colleagues in the field of statistics, he was widely known as a leader who shaped the discipline of biostatistics. He "transformed clinical trial research into a statistically sophisticated branch of medical research."
Anne Ferguson was a Scottish physician, clinical researcher and expert in inflammatory bowel disease. She was considered one of the most distinguished gastroenterologists in Britain.
Ethel Marian Scott, is a Scottish statistician, author and academic, specialising in environmental statistics and statistical modelling. She is Professor of Environmental Statistics at the University of Glasgow. She is additionally Vice-President (International) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council.
Elaine Barbara Martin OBE FREng FIChemE CEng is a chemical engineer and statistician and Head of School at the University of Leeds. She is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, Royal Statistical Society and Royal Academy of Engineering.
Norna Robertson is a lead scientist at LIGO at California Institute of Technology, and professor of experimental physics at the University of Glasgow. Her career has focused on experimental research into suspension systems and instrumentation to achieve the detection of gravitational waves.
Professor Jane Norman MD, MB ChB, CCT, MRCOG, FRCOG, FRCP Edin, F Med Sci, FRSE is an academic and physician. She was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Bristol in 2019.