The RSS is looking to fill five Ordinary Member vacancies on its Council, the trustees of the Royal Statistical Society, to start in 2019.
Council consists of the Honorary Officers and 24 Ordinary Members. The Society's Byelaws require Council to put forward at least two more nominations than there are vacancies. This year, we have seven candidates for five vacancies. The period of office for Ordinary Members is four years.
The nominations are published below; any fellow can make additional nominations. An electronic ballot of all members is then held during September and October with the results being known in late October.
Voting closes at midnight onThursday 18 October 2018.
Professor Mario Cortina Borja
Mario is professor of biostatistics at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London. Before moving to UCL he worked at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas in Mexico City, the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, and the University of Bath; he was statistical consulting and teaching officer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2000. He has a BSc and MSc from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and a PhD from the University of Bath. Mario has worked on a wide range of topics including infectious disease epidemiology during pregnancy and childhood, especially HIV, toxoplasmosis and hepatitis C; physical activity in children, paediatric ophthalmology, and birth timing and birthdays.
Mario is an active member of the RSS. He was book reviews editor for Significance and JRSS-A between 2006 and 2010, and was a member of the General Applications section between 2001 and 2014. He has been an editorial board member of Significance for more than 11 years and has chaired it since 2015.
Dr Johanna Hutchinson
Johanna is head of data for The Pensions Regulator, holding a remit to manage the data estate and embed data into the business for the clearer, quicker, tougher regulation of occupational pensions. She was recently announced as one of the top 100 data leaders in the UK.
Previous to this, as a civil servant, Johanna was influential in encouraging the best use of government data to provide increased public value. She wrote the first Data Strategy and centralised the data sharing function in HMRC; assessed and advised on quality improvements to the CPIH and UK Trade economic statistics and ran the stocktake for the revision of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics (published recently). As a data innovator she brought new ways of working to central government, ran hackathons, developed interactive dashboards, developed agile data science studios and supported the policy formation of the Digital Economy Act.
In a previous career Johanna undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Portsmouth and gained a PhD from the University of Liverpool, both in comparative psychology.
Nigel Marriott (CStat & CSci)
Nigel is an independent statistical consultant and trainer based in Bath. He started his company, Marriott Statistical Consulting Ltd, in 2006 after a 15 year career in the food industry covering two companies, ED&F Man Cocoa Ltd and Mars Inc. Nigel has accrued a wealth of experience working with research, intelligence, planning and forecasting teams within a broad range of areas such as: purchasing, finance, trading desks, sales, marketing, product design, IT, engineering, manufacturing, quality and scientific fields. This is highly unusual in any profession, but particularly for a statistician. To date, Nigel has worked with more than 130 customers from around the world providing services in five areas; survey design and analysis, customer analytics, forecasting & risk modelling, statistical training and expert witness and advisory services. Nigel’s particular passion and skill is explaining complex statistical ideas to non-statistical audiences.
Nigel joined the RSS in 2001 and has been particularly active in the society in the last 10 years. He is currently chair of the Quality & Improvement Section and a member of the RSS Diversity and Inclusion committee. In the past, he was a member of the Professional Affairs Committee (2013-2017), the Professional Development Committee (2013-2015) and chaired the working group which designed the current version of the Consultants Directory on the RSS website. He has delivered many presentations at RSS events and conferences and currently delivers a number of training courses on behalf of the RSS to external customers.
He has previous experience of serving as a trustee of a charity having been a trustee of SENSE, the world’s largest deafblind charity, from 2001 to 2008 and Vision Bath, a local charity for the blind, from 2008 to 2011.
Dr Claire Miller
Claire is a reader in statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Glasgow. She graduated from her PhD in 2007, which was on developing univariate and multivariate statistical methods for analysing lake ecosystem responses. Claire's current research interests are in developing smoothing, functional data analysis, time series and multivariate methods for spatiotemporal data challenges arising predominantly in environmental water quality applications. Claire has lectured to undergraduate and postgraduate students at all levels, supervised seven PhD students and two MSc by research students successfully to completion, and currently supervises four PhD students and two PDRAs.
Claire is an associate editor for the journal Environmetrics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, an elected member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland and elected secretary of The International Environmetrics Society (TIES). She was the lead organiser for the International Workshop on Statistical Modelling conference in Glasgow in July 2010 and the elected secretary for the Statistical Modelling Society from Jan 2011-Dec 2014. Claire was one of the main organisers for the TIES conference in Edinburgh in July 2016. She has been a member of the RSS Academic Affairs Advisory group since 2016, chair of the Glasgow local group of the RSS from 2014-2017, and was a member of the programme committee for the RSS conference hosted in Glasgow in Sept 2017.
Dr Tom Smith
Tom is managing director at the UK’s OCSI, a research and data 'spin-out' company from the University of Oxford.
A life-long data addict, Tom has a PhD in computational neuroscience, evolving neural networks for robot control (Sussex, 2001), an MSc in knowledge-based systems (Sussex, 1997), and MA in theoretical physics (Cambridge, 1994). His primary research interests are in using data, statistics and data science to improve public services, machine learning, and assessing non-traditional data sources to improve our understanding of society and the economy.
Tom has more than 20 years’ experience using data and analysis to improve public services. In his role at ONS, he leads on data science and AI, leading a team of 40 data scientists (growing towards 70) working collaboratively with government, university and industry partners. At OCSI, he led data & research projects with hundreds of local and national public and community sector organisations, including the government’s English Indices of Deprivation (highly commended in the 2016 RSS Excellence in Official Statistics awards).
Tom actively supports the wider use of data, statistics and data science in government and public services, and has been chair of the Environment Agency Data Advisory Group, member of the Open Data User Group ministerial advisory group to Cabinet Office, member of the Guardian Public Leaders Advisory Board, and has acted as an external advisor on opening-up, sharing and using data for multiple government departments. He is an active member of the RSS, currently vice-chair of the Official Statistics section and previously member of the Area Classification group.
Dr Deirdre Toher
Deirdre is a senior lecturer in applied statistics at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She is currently programme leader for BSc Mathematics and Statistics and for MMath Mathematics. Prior to coming to UWE in 2009, she completed her PhD in Trinity College Dublin, working on developing statistical methods for use in food authentication. She also worked for a market research company prior to beginning her PhD.
Her research projects are mainly collaborative in nature, with current projects including monitoring water consumption patterns in student accommodation; calibration of innovative particulate sensors alongside ongoing collaborations with medics at the local NHS trust.
Deirdre is an active member of the Society and is currently secretary of the Emerging Applications Section. She is one of the RSS statistical ambassadors and is also a volunteer for the Science Media Centre's 'Before the Headlines' scheme.
Dr Matthew Upson
Matthew leads the data science work at the legal-tech company Juro, where he applies statistical techniques (natural language processing and machine learning) to solve legal sector data problems. Prior to this, Matthew was a data scientist at the Government Digital Service where he helped develop the first application of deep learning to GOV.UK and worked to transform the production of official statistics by introducing software development practices to statistical computing.
Matthew is a founding member of the RSS Data Science Section, and served as the first secretary of the section committee. He holds a PhD in environmental science and is a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute where he works to make research more robust by improving the way scientists and civil servants write and use software for statistical analysis.
Matthew is interested in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, official statistics, and environmental statistics. He runs the data science blog www.machinegurning.com.