David George Clayton (born 13 June 1944), is a British

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

and

epidemiologist Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and risk factor, determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decision ...

. He is titular Professor of

Biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experime ...

in the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

and

Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of one of the predecessors of Glaxo ...

and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Principal Research Fellow in the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, where he chairs the statistics group. Clayton is an

ISI highly cited researcher The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, ...

placing him in the top 250 most cited scientists in the mathematics world over the last 20 years.

Career

Clayton has worked in theoretical and applied statistics, both

frequentist Frequentist inference is a type of statistical inference based in frequentist probability, which treats “probability” in equivalent terms to “frequency” and draws conclusions from sample-data by means of emphasizing the frequency or pr ...

and

Bayesian Thomas Bayes (/beɪz/; c. 1701 – 1761) was an English statistician, philosopher, and Presbyterian minister. Bayesian () refers either to a range of concepts and approaches that relate to statistical methods based on Bayes' theorem, or a followe ...

. With

Norman Breslow Norman Edward Breslow (February 21, 1941 – December 9, 2015) was an American statistician and medical researcher. At the time of his death, he was Professor (Emeritus) of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, of the University of Washi ...

he has published important work on

generalized linear mixed model In statistics, a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) is an extension to the generalized linear model (GLM) in which the linear predictor contains random effects in addition to the usual fixed effects. They also inherit from GLMs the idea of exte ...

s. Clayton was a pioneer in the application of MCMC methods to problems in biostatistics. More recently, he has worked in

genetic epidemiology Genetic epidemiology is the study of the role of genetic factors in determining health and disease in families and in populations, and the interplay of such genetic factors with environmental factors. Genetic epidemiology seeks to derive a statist ...

. Clayton read

Natural Sciences Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...

King's College, Cambridge King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the city ...

and following this worked as a researcher in

ergonomics Human factors and ergonomics (commonly referred to as human factors) is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Four primary goals of human factors learnin ...

and

cybernetics Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...

. He then worked as a statistician at the

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a public research university in Bloomsbury, central London, and a member institution of the University of London that specialises in public health and tropical medicine. The inst ...

, the

University of Leicester , mottoeng = So that they may have life , established = , type = public research university , endowment = £20.0 million , budget = £326 million , chancellor = David Willetts , vice_chancellor = Nishan Canagarajah , head_labe ...

and the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge before taking up his present position. He was awarded the

Guy Medal The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Silver and Bronze medals are awarded annually. The Gold Medal was awarded every three years between 1987 and 2011, but is awarded biennia ...

in Silver of the

Royal Statistical Society The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is an established statistical society. It has three main roles: a British learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics for the public good. ...

in 1990 and, with Norman Breslow, the Snedecor Prize of the

Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) comprises the presidents, past presidents and presidents -elect of the following, primarily Northern American, professional societies of statisticians: * American Statistical Association * ...

of North America (COPSS) in 1995. He was a lead statistician for the

Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (abbreviated WTCCC) is a collaboration between fifty research groups in the United Kingdom in the field of human genetics. Established in 2005, the WTCCC aims to conduct genome-wide association studies (G ...

, a

genome-wide association study In genomics, a genome-wide association study (GWA study, or GWAS), also known as whole genome association study (WGA study, or WGAS), is an observational study of a genome-wide set of Single-nucleotide polymorphism, genetic variants in different i ...

References

* *Clayton, David and Michael Hills (1993) ''Statistical Models in Epidemiology'' Oxford University Press. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Clayton, David Living people British statisticians Genetic epidemiologists British epidemiologists 1944 births Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellows