Speaker: Peter Diggle (Lancaster)

Aimed at: Teachers and year 11+ students. The talk is aimed at a general audience and no preliminary knowledge of mathematics/statistics will be necessary.

When: May 16th, 2018

Where: MS.01 Zeeman building (Maths and Stats), at 6.15 pm.

Attendance is free. Refreshments served after the lecture.

Title: Statistics: a data science for the twenty-first century

Abstract: The rise of data science could be seen as a potential threat to the long-term status of the statistics discipline. In this lecture, I will argue that, although there is a threat, there is also a much greater opportunity to re-emphasize the universal relevance of statistical method to the interpretation of data. I will describe several recent research projects through which I hope to demonstrate that statistics makes an essential, but incomplete, contribution to the emerging field of ‘electronic health’ research, and will offer some personal thoughts on how the statistics discipline should seize the data science opportunity.

Short Bio: Peter Diggle is a Distinguished University Professor of Statistics in the Faculty of Health and Medicine, Lancaster University and Director of Training for Health Data Research UK. He also holds Adjunct positions at Johns Hopkins, Yale and Columbia Universities, and was president of the Royal Statistical Society from 2014 to 2016.

Between 1974 and 1983 Prof Diggle was a Lecturer, then Reader in Statistics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Between 1984 and 1988 he was Senior, then Principal, then Chief Research Scientist and Chief of the Division of Mathematics and Statistics at CSIRO, Australia.

Prof Diggle's research involves the development of statistical methods for spatial and longitudinal data analysis and their applications in the biomedical, health and environmental sciences. He was awarded the Royal Statistical Society's Guy Medal in Silver in 1997, and the Barnett Award and Lecture in 2017.

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