We are pleased to announce that the RSS Council has nominated Professor David Firth to be the next RSS President after Sylvia Richardson's term of office comes to a close at the end of 2022.
Having taken into account all the suggestions received from the membership last autumn, the President Nominating Committee recommended to Council that David Firth be nominated. Council endorsed this nomination at end of March.
David Firth is Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Warwick, where he has worked since 2003. Previously he was Professor of Social Statistics at Oxford, and before that he worked at the University of Southampton and the University of Texas at Austin. He has MSc and PhD degrees in Statistics, both from Imperial College London.
David's research is in statistical theory and methods generally, and applications especially in social science. His consultancy projects have included election-night forecasting for the BBC, where he developed a novel method for exit polling which has now been used by the major UK broadcasters at the last five UK general elections; and working with the Social Disadvantage Research Centre in Oxford he developed a new method to combine disparate dimensions of local deprivation data into an overall Index of Multiple Deprivation, the method that has now been in use across all four nations of the UK since 2000.
He has served as an editor of JRSS (Series B), and two stints as chair of the RSS Research Section. In 2006, with Wilfrid Kendall and colleagues from a consortium of other UK and Irish universities, he helped to create the EPSRC-funded Academy for PhD Training in Statistics which continues to be a national focus for first-year PhD students in statistics.
David has received the RSS Guy Medals in Bronze and Silver, and also (with Heather Turner) the ASA's John M Chambers Award for statistical software. He is a fellow of the British Academy.
For more information on the nomination process and on what happens next, please read about how the RSS chooses its President.