Brief Biographies of Fisher Memorial Trust Members
Rosemary Bailey
Rosemary Bailey is Professor of Statistics at the University of St Andrews, and also Professor Emerita at Queen Mary University of London. She worked for the Medical Research Council's Air Pollution Research Unit before studying at the University of Oxford, where she obtained a BA in Mathematics and a DPhil in Group Theory. As a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh she learnt how to apply group theory to problems in design of experiments. She spent ten years applying this knowledge in the Statistics Department at Rothamsted Experimental Station, before moving to academia. She was President of the then-British Region of the International Biometric Society from 2000 to 2002. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Heather Battey
Heather Battey is a Reader in the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London. She completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2011. After postdoctoral research as a Brunel Fellow in Statistics at the University of Bristol and as a research fellow at Princeton University, she joined Imperial College London as a lecturer in 2016, since becoming a reader there. Battey was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2023, "for contributions to statistical theory and applied probability, in particular for work on new approaches to well-calibrated high-dimensional and conditional inference, and for work on development of the theoretical foundations of statistical inference".
Walter Bodmer
Walter Bodmer did his Ph.D. under R.A Fisher in Cambridge University and was a postdoctoral Fellow under Joshua Lederberg at Stanford University. He was a Professor of Genetics at Stanford and Oxford Universities, then Director of Imperial Cancer Research Fund UK and subsequently Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. He made major contributions to the discovery of the human tissue typing system, HLA, and its molecular characterisation and in 2013 was awarded a Royal Medal from the Royal Society "for seminal contributions to population genetics, gene mapping and understanding of familial genetic disease." His current research is focused mainly on colorectal cancer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and was Knighted in 1986. He was Chairman of the FMT from 1975 to 2021.
Brian Charlesworth (Chairman)
Brian Charlesworth is a Senior Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He obtained his PhD in genetics at Cambridge in 1969, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Richard Lewontin at the University of Chicago. He subsequently worked at the Universities of Liverpool, Sussex and Chicago, moving to Edinburgh as a Royal Society Research Professor in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. His research interests are in population genetics theory, molecular evolution and genome evolution.
Andrew Mead (Secretary)
Andrew Mead is Head of the Statistics and Data Science Section at Rothamsted Research. After completing a BSc in Statistics at the University of Bath, he then completed the MSc in Biometry at the University of Reading. He spent 25 years working for the AFRC Institute for Horticultural Research and the organisations that it morphed into (Horticulture Research International, Warwick HRI (University of Warwick)) before joining the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, taking up his current post at Rothamsted Research in 2014. He served as President and Vice-President of the International Biometric Society (2007-2010) after periods in the previous decade serving on regional and international committees of the society. He is also a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society and a member of the European Weed Research Society. His research interests are in the statistical design of experiments and the application of statistical modelling and multivariate methods to tackle real-life problems in agricultural and environmental sciences. He also has strong interests in statistical training for non-statisticians.
Stephen Senn (Treasurer)
Stephen Senn is an honorary professor at the University of Sheffield and an honorary adjunct professor at the Medical University of Vienna. He is a medical statistician who has worked in the UK, Switzerland, Luxembourg and France in the National Health Service, the Pharmaceutical Industry and in various academic positions. His research interests are in statistical methods in drug development. He was awarded the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Ian Tomlinson
Ian Tomlinson is Professor of Cancer Genetics at the University of Oxford, and has expertise in the genetics of colorectal cancer (CRC) and other tumour types. With a career spanning over 25 years in the field, he has produced over 650 peer-reviewed publications, many in high-impact journals. His main contributions to the field of colorectal cancer research include: the identification and characterization of 6 of the 14 known Mendelian CRC predisposition genes (GREM1, POLE, POLD1, MBD4, SMAD4, STK11) using a combination of linkage analysis, candidate gene studies and whole-genome sequencing; co-leading the largest GWAS efforts to identify over 200 polymorphisms associated with the risk of CRC, other cancers and their benign precursor lesions; described new paradigms in cancer evolution in relation to selection and hypermutation; and constructed mathematical models of tumorigenesis and carcinogenesis.
Christina Yap
Christina Yap is Professor of Clinical Trials Biostatistics and Group Leader of ICR-CTSU Early Phase & Adaptive Trials at the Institute of Cancer Research. Christina has over 20 years of experience in statistical design and analysis of clinical trials. Her main expertise comprises of development and practical implementation of efficient design and analysis in clinical trials. This includes adaptive designs in early phase dose-finding trials as well as multi-arm multi-stage randomised Phase II/III designs and platform designs; including Bayesian approaches to such settings. She is a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society.