I am a chartered statistician (fellow of the Royal Statistical Society) and author of two textbooks. I am particularly interested in biostatistics, Bayesian modelling and inference, evidence synthesis, data visualisation and communication to decision-makers. This website provides a static repository of my publications, programming and related material.
I programmed the interface from Stata to Stan software for Bayesian inference, and the kudzu package in R and C++.
I use a wide range of analytical methods: Bayesian, frequentist, likelihood, and machine learning. I think that the right tool should be used for each job. My personal philosophical standpoint for inference emphasises justified eclecticism.
My first book, "Data Visualization: charts, maps and interactive graphics" was published by CRC Press and the American Statistical Society in 2018.
"Bayesian Meta-Analysis: a practical introduction", co-written with Professor Gian Luca Di Tanna, was published by CRC Press in June 2025. We are populating an accompanying website at bayesian-ma.net with code and examples.
History
My family's background was in the fishing industry in Scotland, which largely collapsed around the time I was born in the 1970s. I spent some of my childhood in Swaziland (now Eswatini) and South Africa before returning to the UK as a teenager. After working in a photocopy shop and supermarket, I went to Kingston University in 1995 to study Mathematical Sciences, a combination of pure maths, operational research, numerical optimisation and calculus, probability and statistics, and programming. I had a lucky break in 1998 and started work at the Research Unit of the Royal College of Physicians in London (later the Clinical Effectiveness and Evaluation Unit) on a variety of clinical audit projects. During this time I finished the first degree with the Open University in evenings and weekends. In recent years, I have enjoyed returning to topics in pure mathematics that cast light on data analytic tasks and methods, including Lie groups and topology.
When the unit was commissioned by the new National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE, later "Health and Care Excellence") in 2000 to start work on evidence-based clinical guidelines for chronic conditions, I became involved as project manager. On both the audit and guidelines sides, I spent a lot of time in advisory group meetings with clinicians, methodologists and policy people, and saw what went to make effective communication and group dynamics. One of my key roles was to capture all meeting decisions and the evidence-based rationale (or clinical expertise), and to translate this into a first draft of each guideline section. Writing has remained a central aspect of what I do (in fact, I recall telling a schoolteacher that I was going to be an author: I had moved on from astronaut). As time passed, I became more involved in the statistical analysis and reporting under the mentoring of Derek Lowe, and I decided to go part time and study for a masters degree in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
When I completed that degree in 2010, I had another good opportunity open up: an academic post in the faculty shared between St George's, University of London (now City St George's) and Kingston University. As an "isolated statistician" in a clinical (but non-medical) faculty, I got involved in many very diverse projects: clinical trials, epidemiology and health service research. It certainly laid the groundwork for the consulting work that followed. I also taught postgraduate students statistics and research methods, and supervised one MRes student each year. During this time, I started new collaborations between my faculty and Moorfields Eye Hospital and Princess Alice Hospice. I was a member of the Royal Statistical Society's statistical computing committee (now absorbed into data science and machine learning) and organised a conference session and discussion meeting. I was also a member of NHS England's National Advisory Group for Clinical Audit and Confidential Enquiries (NAGCAE) and chaired the sub-group for renewal of nationally commissioned projects. I became involved with the Stan development team and contributed the interface to Stata software, then started teaching Bayesian analysis with Stan for the Royal Statistical Society. I also taught as a guest instructor on Harvard Medical School's "Global Clinical Scholars Research Training" hybrid learning program online and in Portugal, UAE, USA and UK.
In 2017, I left academia and started my own company, BayesCamp, to offer training, coaching (based on a business coaching course I took at City University) and consulting services. My first book, on data visualisation, was published the following year. The rise of online training through the Covid years led me to pivot the company to the consulting side. I had a wide variety of fascinating clients, most of whom I cannot write about for reasons of confidentiality. Nevertheless, I can name the World Bank, The Economist, the Cabinet Office, and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. I learnt more and more in this time about communication and the importance of interpersonal relationships and group dynamics in support of effective data-driven decision-making, including a course I took in popular science writing at the University of Cambridge. I started work on a new book on Bayesian meta-analysis, with Professor Gian Luca Di Tanna, and it was published in 2025. I returned to my starting point at Kingston's School of Mathematics and Computer Science to teach a couple of weeks a year on the new MSc Data Science course from 2020 to 2024; my topics were data analytics and visualisation (in R and Python). With KU colleague Dr Gordon Hunter as my supervisor, I worked up a portfolio of research for a PhD submission by prior publication, and was awarded a grey floppy cap a week before I turned 50. The title was "applications of Bayesian latent variable models to challenges in health and social care data".
Now, I am about to begin a fifth phase to my working life, though I will explain that in January 2026.
I live in Hampshire in the south of England, with my wife and daughter, who shows some impressive aptitude with numbers, far in advance of my abilities at the same age.
