Sylvia Richardson is a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 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...

 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...

. She has been chair in Biostatistics

Biostatistics

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

 at Imperial College London since 2000. Previously, she held lectureships at Warwick University and the University of Paris V.

She has made significant contributions to Bayesian statistical methodology and the application of Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Markov chain Monte Carlo

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a class of algorithms for sampling from probability distributions based on constructing a Markov chain that has the desired distribution as its equilibrium distribution. The state of the chain after a large number of steps is then used as a sample of the...

. Her expertise is in spatial statistics with applications to geographic epidemiology

Epidemiology

Epidemiology is the study of health-event, health-characteristic, or health-determinant patterns in a population. It is the cornerstone method of public health research, and helps inform policy decisions and evidence-based medicine by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive...

 and in biostatistics with applications in biochemical modeling, in particular modeling of gene expression

Gene expression

Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product. These products are often proteins, but in non-protein coding genes such as ribosomal RNA , transfer RNA or small nuclear RNA genes, the product is a functional RNA...

 data.

She is co-editor of the volume Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice with Wally Gilks and David Spiegelhalter

David Spiegelhalter

David John Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS, is a distinguished British statistician. In 2007 he was elected Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge...

.

She was awarded the Guy Medal 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 Silver in 2009.