New S3RI Director appointed
Steven Gilmour, Professor of Statistics, is the new Director of the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI). He takes over from Professor Peter Smith who led the Institute for the last three years.
Steve's aims include increasing awareness of statistics and its importance in fields as diverse as engineering, food science and drug discovery. S3RI brings together statisticians at the University of Southampton who work in different fields including survey methods, design of experiments and biostatistics. Research at S3RI is broad-based, involving more than 50 statisticians in Mathematical Sciences, Social Sciences, Geography, Medicine and other disciplines within the University. Academics bring their expert knowledge of statistics to many partnerships and collaborations with companies and organisations across the world and also run a programme of short courses to train external statisticians.
"I want to step up visibility of statistics both inside and outside the University," he explains. "Statistics plays an important part in helping us understand our world and our cutting edge research into methodologies and applied statistics is being taken up by clinicians, scientists and engineers as well as by people who need effective techniques to understand surveys and databases."
Steve's own research involves improving the design of experiments in large complex networks; he is currently working with Public Health England on a project to develop ultra-clean medical instruments. His other personal research interests include the use of statistics in the bioprocessing sector such as pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and food, the sciences underpinning these industries and statistical modelling and computation.