Emeritus Professor of Statistics, University of Cambridge
Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Website Sir David Spiegelhalter
Vita
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, which aimed to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers. He was very busy over the Covid crisis. He presented the BBC4 documentaries “Tails you Win: the Science of Chance”, the award-winning “Climate Change by Numbers”. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics, was published in March 2019, and Covid by Numbers came out in September 2021. His career highlights include appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2022, and in 2011 coming 7th in an episode of BBC1’s Winter Wipeout.
He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020.
Selected Publications
Dryhurst, S., Schneider, C. R., Kerr, J., Freeman, A. L., Recchia, G., Van Der Bles, A. M., ... & Van Der Linden, S. (2022). Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world. In COVID-19 (pp. 162-174). Routledge.
Van Der Bles, A. M., van der Linden, S., Freeman, A. L., & Spiegelhalter, D. J. (2020). The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7672-7683.
Smith, G. D., & Spiegelhalter, D. (2020). Shielding from covid-19 should be stratified by risk. BMJ, 369.
Freeman, A. L., Parker, S., Noakes, C., Fitzgerald, S., Smyth, A., Macbeth, R., Spiegelhalter, D. & Rutter, H. (2021). Expert elicitation on the relative importance of possible SARS-CoV-2 transmission routes and the effectiveness of mitigations. BMJ open, 11(12), e050869
Mamidanna, R., Ni, Z., Anderson, O., Spiegelhalter, D., Bottle, A., Aylin, P., ... & Hanna, G. B. (2016). Surgeon volume and cancer esophagectomy, gastrectomy, and pancreatectomy: a population-based study in England. Annals of surgery, 263(4), 727-732.