Nicky Best

Last updated

Nicola G. "Nicky" Best is a statistician known for her work on the deviance information criterion in Bayesian inference [B] [E] and as a developer of Bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling. [1] [A] [D] She is a former professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Imperial College London and is currently a biostatistician for GlaxoSmithKline. [2]

Contents

Education and career

Best earned a master's degree in medical statistics from the University of Leicester in 1990 [2] and then a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Cambridge, supervised by David Spiegelhalter. [3] She joined the Imperial College faculty in 1996. [1] She moved from Imperial to GlaxoSmithKline in 2014. [2]

She was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), from 2001 to 2004. [4]

Recognition

Best won the Guy Medal in Bronze of the Royal Statistical Society in 2004. [5] In 2018, she won the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society "for her exquisite expositions of Bayesian methods through BUGS software, workshops, lectures, prior elicitations, textbooks and peer-review publications; and for substantive applications ranging from clinical trials and cost-effectiveness to epidemiology and, most recently, the optimization of pharmaceutical research programmes". [6]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">M. S. Bartlett</span> English statistician (1910–2002)

Maurice Stevenson Bartlett FRS was an English statistician who made particular contributions to the analysis of data with spatial and temporal patterns. He is also known for his work in the theory of statistical inference and in multivariate analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Dawid</span> British statistician

Alexander Philip Dawid is Emeritus Professor of Statistics of the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He is a leading proponent of Bayesian statistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Spiegelhalter</span> English statistician (born 1953)

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.

Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a leading international authority on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases. He is the author, with Robert May, of the most highly cited book in this field, entitled Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control. His early work was on the population ecology of infectious agents before focusing on the epidemiology and control of human infections. His published research includes studies of the major viral, bacterial and parasitic infections of humans, wildlife and livestock. This has included major studies on HIV, SARS, foot and mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), influenza A, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the neglected tropical diseases and most recently COVID-19. Anderson is the author of over 650 peer-reviewed scientific articles with an h-index of 125.

Sylvia Therese Richardson is a French/British Bayesian statistician and is currently Professor of Biostatistics and Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge. In 2021 she became the president of the Royal Statistical Society for the 2021–22 year.

Peter James Green, FRS is a British Bayesian statistician. He is emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, and a professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is distinguished for his contributions to computational statistics, in particular his contributions to spatial statistics and semi-parametric regression models and also his development of reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Holmes (mathematician)</span> British statistician

Christopher C. Holmes is a British statistician. He has held the position of Professor of Biostatistics in Genomics in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford since September 2014, a post that carries with it a Fellowship of St Anne's College, Oxford. Previously he was titular Professor of Biostatistics and a Fellow of Lincoln College. After working in industry he completed his doctorate in Bayesian statistics at Imperial College, London, supervised by Adrian Smith.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sander Greenland</span> American statistician and epidemiologist

Sander Greenland is an American statistician and epidemiologist with many contributions to statistical and epidemiologic methods including Bayesian and causal inference, bias analysis, and meta-analysis. His focus has been the extensions, limitations, and misuses of statistical methods in nonexperimental studies, especially in postmarketing surveillance of drugs, vaccines, and medical devices. He received honors Bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Regent's and National Science Foundation Fellow in Mathematics, and then received Master's and Doctoral degrees in epidemiology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was Regent's Fellow in Epidemiology. After serving as an assistant professor of biostatistics at Harvard, he joined the UCLA Epidemiology faculty in 1980 where he became Professor of Epidemiology in the Fielding School of Public Health in 1989, and Professor of Statistics in the UCLA College of Letters and Science in 1999. He moved to Emeritus status in 2012 and the following year he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Medicine by the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

David George Clayton, is a British statistician and epidemiologist. He is titular Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Principal Research Fellow in the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, where he chairs the statistics group. Clayton is an ISI highly cited researcher placing him in the top 250 most cited scientists in the mathematics world over the last 20 years.

Gareth Owen Roberts FRS FLSW is a statistician and applied probabilist. He is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Director of the Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology (CRiSM) at the University of Warwick. He is an established authority on the stability of Markov chains, especially applied to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) theory methodology for a wide range of latent statistical models with applications in spatial statistics, infectious disease epidemiology and finance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Reid</span> Canadian statistician

Nancy Margaret Reid is a Canadian theoretical statistician. She is a professor at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory. In 2015 Reid became Director of the Canadian Institute for Statistical Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sheila Bird</span> British statistician

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.

Mary Elizabeth (Betz) Halloran is an American biostatistician who works as a professor of biostatistics, professor of epidemiology, and adjunct professor of applied mathematics at the University of Washington.

Deborah Ashby is a British statistician and academic who specialises in medical statistics and Bayesian statistics. She is the Director of the School of Public Health and Chair in Medical Statistics and Clinical Trials at Imperial College London. She was previously a lecturer then a reader at the University of Liverpool and a professor at Queen Mary University of London.

Sudipto Banerjee is an Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and inference for spatial data analysis. He is Professor of Biostatistics and Senior Associate Dean in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He served as the Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at UCLA from 2014 through 2023. He served as the elected President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2022.

Lurdes Yoshiko Tani Inoue is a Brazilian-born statistician of Japanese descent, who specializes in Bayesian inference. She works as a professor of biostatistics in the University of Washington School of Public Health.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bhramar Mukherjee</span> Indian-American biostatistician, data scientist

Bhramar Mukherjee is an Indian-American biostatistician, data scientist, professor and researcher. She is the John D. Kalbfleisch Distinguished University Professor of Biostatistics, Siobán D. Harlow Collegiate Professor of Public Health and the Chair of Department of Biostatistics, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan. She serves as the associate director for Quantitative Data Sciences at University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. Mukherjee holds a Senior Honorary Visiting Fellow position at the Biostatistics Unit of the Medical Research Council, working on the theme of population health at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has served as the past Chair for Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) for a three-year term 2019-2021.

Azra Catherine Hilary Ghani is a British epidemiologist who is a professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. Her research considers the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, including malaria, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and coronavirus. She has worked with the World Health Organization on their technical strategy for malaria. She is associate director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis.

Yingying Fan is a Chinese-American statistician and Centennial Chair in Business Administration and Professor in Data Sciences and Operations Department of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. She is currently the Associate Dean for the PhD Program at USC Marshall. She also holds joint appointments at the USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Keck Medicine of USC. Her contributions to statistics and data science were recognized by the Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze in 2017 and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Medallion Lecture in 2023. She was elected Fellow of American Statistical Association in 2019 and Fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics for seminal contributions to high-dimensional inference, variable selection, classification, networks, and nonparametric methodology, particularly in the field of financial econometrics, and for conscientious professional service in 2020.

Ruth Mary Mickey is a retired American statistician known for her research on feature selection to control the effects of confounding on statistical inference, and on the applications of statistics to issues of public health and natural resources. She is a professor emerita in the University of Vermont Department of Mathematics & Statistics.

References

  1. 1 2 "Nicky Best", Speaker biographies, ESF 2014, retrieved 2019-09-13
  2. 1 2 3 "Professor Nicky Best", Industry and innovation case studies, The Royal Society, retrieved 2019-09-13
  3. "Curriculum vitae" (PDF), Understanding Uncertainty, retrieved 2019-05-10
  4. Professor Nicky Best: Honours and Memberships, Imperial College London, retrieved 2019-09-13
  5. "Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews, retrieved 2019-09-13
  6. "RSS announces recipients of 2018 honours", StatsLife, Royal Statistical Society, 22 January 2018, retrieved 2019-09-13