David George Clayton, born 13 June 1944, is a distinguished British statistician

Statistician

A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...

 and epidemiologist. He is titular Professor of Biostatistics

Biostatistics

Biostatistics is the application of statistics to a wide range of topics in biology...

 in the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 and Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust was established in 1936 as an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health. With an endowment of around £13.9 billion, it is the United Kingdom's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research...

 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

ISI highly cited researcher

ISI Highly Cited is a database of "highly cited researchers"—scientific researchers whose publications are most often cited in academic journals over the past decade, published by the Institute for Scientific Information...

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

Clayton has worked in theoretical and applied statistics, both frequentist and Bayesian

Bayesian statistics

Bayesian statistics is that subset of the entire field of statistics in which the evidence about the true state of the world is expressed in terms of degrees of belief or, more specifically, Bayesian probabilities...

. With Norman Breslow

Norman Breslow

Norman E. Breslow is an American statistician and medical researcher.He and co-author Nicholas Day developed and popularized the use of case-control matched sample research designs, in the two-volume work Statistical Methods in Cancer Research.-References:* 1980, Statistical Methods in Cancer...

 he has published important work on generalized linear mixed model

Generalized linear mixed model

In statistics, a generalized linear mixed model is a particular type of mixed model. It is an extension to the generalized linear model in which the linear predictor contains random effects in addition to the usual fixed effects...

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

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...

.

Clayton read Natural Sciences at King's College, Cambridge

King's College, Cambridge

King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....

 and following this worked as a researcher in ergonomics

Ergonomics

Ergonomics is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities.The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics as follows:...

 and cybernetics

Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...

. He then worked as a statistician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of Leicester

University of Leicester

The University of Leicester is a research-led university based in Leicester, England. The main campus is a mile south of the city centre, adjacent to Victoria Park and Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College....

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

He was awarded the Guy Medal

Guy Medal

The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Gold Medal is awarded triennially, the other two are awarded annually...

 in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society

Royal Statistical Society

The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...

 in 1990 and, with Norman Breslow, the Snedecor Prize of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies of North America (COPSS) in 1995. He was a lead statistician for the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, a genome-wide association study

Genome-wide association study

In genetic epidemiology, a genome-wide association study , also known as whole genome association study , is an examination of many common genetic variants in different individuals to see if any variant is associated with a trait...

.