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Keynote Speaker

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter

Keynote Speaker

We were delighted to bring Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE to WorldCUR-BCUR 2023 as the Keynote Speaker. Professor Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers. He has been 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. He is @d_spiegel on Twitter, and his home page is http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/.

'How to Not Fall Flat: Communicating Research to Different Audiences'

It is challenging, and possibly frightening, to move from communicating with academic colleagues to engaging with popular media and the general public. I started this change 15 years ago, and can now tell stories of some successes - and some disasters. But between the laughs at my failures, I will give some advice about working with non-academic audiences, and how creative - and fun - this can be.

The Keynote took place in the Butterworth Hall, Warwick Arts Centre, from 10.30am-11.30am on Wednesday 5th April.