A Conversation with A. Philip Dawid

Abstract

Beginning in the 1970s, Alexander Philip Dawid has been a leading contributor to the foundations of statistics and especially to the development and application of Bayesian statistics. He is also known for his work on causality, especially his notation for conditional independence and his critique of the overuse of counterfactuals, and for his contributions to forensic statistics. Dawid was born in Lancashire, England, on February 1, 1946. His family moved to London soon afterwards, and he attended the City of London School from 1956 to 1963. He studied mathematics at Cambridge, earning a BA (Bachelor of Arts) degree in 1966. After earning a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics in the academic year 1966-1967, he studied for a PhD at Imperial, then at UCL, where he became a Lecturer in Statistics in 1969. In 1978, he left UCL for a position as Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics, The City University, London, where he served as Head of Statistics Section and Director of the Statistical Laboratory. He returned to the Department of Statistics at UCL in 1981, serving as Head of Department from 1983 to 1993. He moved to the University of Cambridge in 2007, becoming Professor of Statistics and Fellow of Darwin College. He has continued his work in mathematical statistics after retiring from Cambridge in 2013 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.