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Bernard Silverman

Bernard began his statistical career at Cambridge. He took some statistics courses as part of his BA degree in mathematics in 1973 and then specialised in statistics in his postgraduate work, completing his PhD in 1978, having taken a ‘gap year’ during his time as a research student to design and manage the manufacture of the Sinclair Cambridge programmable calculator, the first pocket programmable calculator.

During his time as a research student, he became a Graduate Member of the Institute of Statisticians by taking their examinations. After a year as a lecturer at Oxford, he spent fifteen years at the University of Bath and ten years at the University of Bristol, before moving to Oxford in 2003 to become Master of St Peter’s College, a post from which he stood down at the end of 2009.

He now has a portfolio of research posts in Oxford, with part-time posts at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, and associations with the department of statistics and the Oxford-Man Institute for Quantitative Finance. 

He has always enjoyed a combination of theoretical, methodological and applied research. His main focus has been on both the theory and the practice of computational statistics, and when he started research this was still a matter of punching cards or editing a file on a teletype and then walking down the road to get the printed output from the central line printer.

At the same time he has enjoyed a very wide range of applied collaborations, both in fields such as genetics, engineering and neuroscience, and in more unusual disciplines such as equine science and palaeo-pathology. He has also been involved in a broad variety of consultancy and government work and is a Chartered Statistician. 

Bernard’s work for the Royal Statistical Society includes a six-year stint as honorary secretary in the 1980s and the chairmanship of the Research Section in the 1990s. He is a Fellow (and currently council member) of the Royal Society and is a past president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics for whom he has just completed a spell as editor of the Annals of Statistics.