David Spiegelhalter

David Spiegelhalter
David Spiegelhalter presenting at the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival
Born	David John Spiegelhalter 16 August 1953[1]
Residence	Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Nationality	British
Fields	Statistics Biostatistics[2]
Institutions	University of Cambridge University of California, Berkeley Brunel University University of Nottingham
Alma mater	University of Oxford (BA) University College London (PhD)
Thesis	Adaptive inference using finite mixture models (1978)
Doctoral advisor	Adrian Smith[3]
Notable awards	Guy Medal OBE FRS (2005) Knight Bachelor (2014)
Website understandinguncertainty.org www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/Dept/People/Spiegelhalter/davids.html

Sir David John Spiegelhalter, OBE FRS (born 16 August 1953), is a British statistician and Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge^[4] and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.^{[2][5][6][7][8]} Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher.

Education

Spiegelhalter studied at the University of Oxford (Bachelor of Arts 1974) and University College London. He gained his Master of Science 1975 and Doctor of Philosophy 1978, supervised by Adrian Smith.^[3][9]

Career

Spiegelhalter was research assistant in Brunel University in 1976 and then visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, 1977–78. After his PhD, he was a research assistant for the Royal College of Physicians; he was based at the University of Nottingham, where his PhD supervisor, Adrian Smith, had been appointed a professor.

From 1981 he was at the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge. He has been an honorary lecturer at the University of Hong Kong since 1991. He has also been a consultant for GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and the World Anti-Doping Agency. He played a leading role in the public inquiries into children's heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the murders by Harold Shipman.^[10] Between 2007 and 2012 he divided his work^[11] between the Cambridge Statistical Laboratory (three-fifths) and the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit (two-fifths).^[12] He left the MRC in March 2012^[13] and now works full-time at the Statistical Laboratory as the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk.

David Spiegelhalter playing with Arco Iris Samba band, July 2009

In 2012, Spiegelhalter hosted the BBC Four documentary Tails You Win: The Science of Chance which described the application of probability in everyday life.^[14] He also presented a 2013 Cambridge Science Festival talk, How to Spot a Shabby Statistic at the Babbage Lecture Theatre in Cambridge.^[8][15]

He has been elected as President of the Royal Statistical Society, and will take up the position on 1 January 2017.

Research

Spiegelhalter's research interests are in statistics^[2][16][17] including

• Bayesian approach to clinical trials, expert systems and complex modelling and epidemiology.^[18]
• Graphical models of conditional independence. He wrote several papers in the 1980s that showed how probability could be incorporated into expert systems, a problem that seemed intractable at the time. Spiegelhalter showed that while frequentist probability did not lend itself to expert systems, Bayesian probability most certainly did.^[19]
• Statistical software.^[20] In the 1990s Spiegelhalter led the Medical Research Council team that developed WinBUGS ("Bayesian analysis Using Gibbs Sampling"), a statistical-modelling system allowing hierarchical prior distributions. WinBUGS and its successor OpenBUGS specifies graphical models using acyclic directed graphs whose nodes are random variables, which are updated using Gibbs sampling (an updating method for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation).^[21] Earlier Bayesian software had required that the probability distribution for the observed data be an exponential family and that the prior be its conjugate distribution. Allowing flexible choices of prior distributions simplified hierarchical modelling and helped to promote multilevel models, which became widely used in epidemiology and education.
• General issues in clinical trials,^[22] including cluster randomisation, meta-analysis and ethical monitoring.
• Monitoring and comparing clinical and public-health outcomes and their associated publication as performance indicators.
• Public understanding of risk,^[23][24] including promoting concepts such as the micromort (a one in a million chance of death) and microlife (a 30-minute reduction of life expectancy). Media reporting of statistics,^[25] risk and probability and the wider conception of uncertainty as going beyond what is measured to model uncertainty, the unknown and the unmeasurable.

Honours

• 1975 Fellow, Royal Statistical Society
• 1985 Guy Medal in Bronze, Royal Statistical Society
• 1990 Award for Outstanding Statistical Application, American Statistical Association^[26]
• 1993 Chartered Statistician, Royal Statistical Society
• 1994 Guy Medal in Silver, Royal Statistical Society
• 1994 Honorary Doctorate, Aalborg University, Denmark
• 2005 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
• 2006 Received an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours
• 2006 Appointed Honorary Professor of Biostatistics at University of Cambridge
• 2009 Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal^[27]
• 2010 Honorary Doctorate of Science, Plymouth University
• 2013 Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University ^[28]

Spiegelhalter was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to statistics.^[29][30]

References

1. SPIEGELHALTER, Prof. David John. Who's Who. 2015 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
2. David Spiegelhalter's publications indexed by Google Scholar
3. David Spiegelhalter at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. "David Spiegelhalter's Personal Home Page". Retrieved 14 September 2011.
5. "Churchill College: Fellows: List of current Fellows". Retrieved 14 September 2011.
6. David Spiegelhalter's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier. (subscription required)
7. David Spiegelhalter on Twitter
8. David Spiegelhalter at the Internet Movie Database
9. Spiegelhalter, David (1978). Adaptive inference using finite mixture models (PhD thesis). University College London.
10. "Programme transcript". BBC News. 2 April 2006.
11. Spiegelhalter, David (October 2009). "Don's Diary". CAM (PDF). Cambridge University Alumni Association. p. 3.
12. "MRC Biostatistics Unit: People". Retrieved 15 September 2011.
13. http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/People/formerstaff.html
14. BBC Four – Tails You Win: The Science of Chance
15. What’s On » Cambridge Science Festival – How to spot a shabby statistic
16. List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
17. David J. Spiegelhalter at DBLP Bibliography Server
18. Spiegelhalter, D. J.; Best, N. G.; Carlin, B. P.; Linde, A. V. D. (2002). "Bayesian Measures of Model Complexity and Fit". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 64 (4): 583–639. doi:10.1111/1467-9868.00353.
19. Lauritzen, S. L.; Spiegelhalter, D. J. (1988). "Local Computations with Probabilities on Graphical Structures and Their Application to Expert Systems". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 50 (2): 157–224. doi:10.2307/2345762. JSTOR 2345762.
20. Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice, W.R. Gilks, S. Richardson and D.J. Speigelhalter. Chapman & Hall. 1996. ISBN 0-412-05551-1
21. Spiegelhalter, David; Thomas, Andrew; Best, Nicky; Lunn, Dave (January 2003), WinBUGS User Manual (Version 1.4 ed.), Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 2SR, UK: MRC Biostatistics Unit, Institute of Public Health, PDF document
22. Neuenschwander, B.; Capkun-Niggli, G.; Branson, M.; Spiegelhalter, D. J. (2010). "Summarizing historical information on controls in clinical trials". Clinical Trials. doi:10.1177/1740774509356002.
23. Spiegelhalter, D.; Pearson, M.; Short, I. (2011). "Visualizing Uncertainty About the Future". Science. 333 (6048): 1393–1400. doi:10.1126/science.1191181. PMID 21903802.
24. "David Spiegelhalter's blog | Understanding Uncertainty". Retrieved 15 September 2011.
25. Riesch, H.; Spiegelhalter, D. J. (2011). "'Careless pork costs lives': Risk stories from science to press release to media". Health, Risk & Society. 13: 47. doi:10.1080/13698575.2010.540645.
26. Outstanding Statistical Application Award, ASA, retrieved 31 March 2014.
27. "Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal – International Statistical Institute". Retrieved 15 September 2011.
28. "David Spiegelhalter's Personal Home Page". www.statslab.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2016-03-29.
29. The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60895. p. b2. 14 June 2014.
30. Gallagher, James (14 June 2014). "Prof Colin Blakemore: Medical research defender knighted". BBC News.