Adrian Smith

Who is Adrian Smith?

Sir Adrian Frederick Melhuish Smith, FRS is a distinguished British statistician and formerly Principal of Queen Mary, University of London. He was previously at Imperial College, London, where he was head of the mathematics department. Smith is a former Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of London and became Vice-Chancellor of the university on 1 September 2012.

Smith is a member of the governing body of the London Business School. He served on the Advisory Council for the Office for National Statistics from 1996–1998, was Statistical Advisor to the Nuclear Waste Inspectorate from 1991–1998 and was advisor on Operational Analysis to the Ministry of Defence from 1982–1987. He is a former President of the Royal Statistical Society. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. His FRS citation included "his diverse contributions to Bayesian statistics. His monographs are the most comprehensive available and his work has had a major impact on the development of monitoring tools for clinicians."

In statistical theory, Smith is a proponent of Bayesian statistics and evidence-based practice—a general extension of evidence-based medicine into all areas of public policy. With Antonio Machi, he translated Bruno de Finetti's Theory of Probability into English. He wrote an influential paper in 1990 along with Alan E. Gelfand, which drew attention to the significance of the Gibbs sampler technique for Bayesian numerical integration problems. He was also co-author of the seminal paper on the particle filter. Smith was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and University College London where his PhD supervisor was Dennis Lindley.