Professor David Firth FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2008
- Subjects
- Sociology
- Website
- http://warwick.ac.uk/dfirth
Summary
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).
Current post
Professor of Statistics, University of Warwick
Past appointments
Royal Statistical Society Chair, Research Section
2009 -
University of Warwick Professor of Statistics, University of Warwick
2003 -
University of Warwick Professor of Statistics, University of Warwick
2003 -
Royal Statistical Society Chair, Research Section
2001 - 2003
Royal Statistical Society Editor, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B
1998 - 2001
University of Oxford Professor of Social Statistics
1993 - 2003
Imperial College of Science and Technology University of London
1986 - 1987
Publications
Other Fellows of the British Academy
Professor Jennifer Mason FBA
Sociology of personal and everyday life; affinities, kinship, relationalities, connectedness, personal relationships; ecological sociology and socio-atmospherics; qualitative, creative and mixed methodologies, including ‘facet methodology’
Professor Donald Rubin FBA
Applied and theoretical statistics, including causal inference in experiments and observational studies, missing data and multiple imputation, and computational methods such as the EM algorithm and extensions
