Professor Sir John Aston FRS is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge. He is the Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life and a Fellow of Churchill College.
John is an applied statistician. He has a particular interest in statistical neuroimaging, official statistics and statistical linguistics. He has methodological interests in functional and object data analysis, time series and image analysis, and spatial-temporal statistics. John leads research into the use of quantitative evidence in public policy making. He works with those in public life to ensure they use the best methods. He aims to improve the use of statistics and quantitative evidence in public policy.
John is a non-executive board member of the UK Statistics Authority. He is a member of the London Policing Board and president-elect of the Royal Statistical Society. He was Chief Scientific Adviser and Director-General for Science, Technology, Analysis, Research and Strategy at the Home Office from 2017 to 2020. He was a founding director of the Alan Turing Institute.
Before joining Cambridge, John held academic positions at the University of Warwick and at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. John was knighted in 2021 for services to statistics and public policy making.
