Professor David Firth FBA

David Firth is a statistical methodologist interested in applications to social science and many other areas ranging from animal behaviour to bibliometrics to sports. He is currently Professor of Statistics at the University of Warwick. He was previously Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Oxford, and has held academic positions also at Southampton, Imperial College London, and the University of Texas at Austin. In 2012 he was awarded the Guy Medal in Silver by the Royal Statistical Society, for innovative research in statistical methodology. His research includes the development of novel exit-polling methods that have been highly successful at UK General Elections since 2001, by broadcasters BBC, ITV and Sky. He has been instrumental in founding some major graduate-education initiatives, including the ESRC Oxford Spring School for Quantitative Methods in Social Research, the Leverhulme-Warwick 'Bridges' Doctoral Scholarships Programme, and the UK-wide EPSRC Academy for PhD Training in Statistics. He has served on many committees including the ESRC Research Grants Board, the National Statistics Methodology Advisory Committee, and the Royal Statistical Society Research Section (including two stints as its Chair, and four years as Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society).