Adrian Smith (statistician)

Sir Adrian Frederick Melhuish Smith, FRS (born 1946, Dawlish, England) is a distinguished British statistician and formerly Principal of Queen Mary, University of London. He was previously at Imperial College, London where he was head of the Mathematics Department. He is a member of the governing body of the London Business School and a former Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of London. He served on the Advisory Council for the Office of National Statistics from 1996–1998, was Statistical Advisor to the Nuclear Waste Inspectorate from 1991–1998 and was advisor on Operational Analysis to the Ministry of Defence from 1982–1987. He is a former President of the Royal Statistical Society. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. His FRS citation included "his diverse contributions to Bayesian statistics. His monographs are the most comprehensive available and his work has had a major impact on the development of monitoring tools for clinicians."

In statistical theory, Smith is a proponent of Bayesian statistics and evidence-based practice—a general extension of evidence-based medicine into all areas of public policy. With Antonio Machi, he translated Bruno de Finetti's Theory of Probability into English. He wrote an influential paper in 1990 along with Alan Gelfand, which drew attention to the significance of the Gibbs sampler technique for Bayesian numerical integration problems. He was also co-author of the seminal paper on the particle filter (Gordon, Salmond and Smith, 1993). Smith was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge and University College London where his PhD supervisor was Dennis Lindley.

In mathematics and statistics education, Smith led the team which produced the Smith Report on secondary mathematics education in the United Kingdom.

In April 2008, Smith was appointed as Director General of Science and Research at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (since merged with another department to form the UK's BIS). He took up his post in September 2008. His annual remuneration for this role is £160,000.

Smith was knighted in the 2011 New Year Honours.

Smith became Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1 September 2012.