An audience with Prof. Sylvia Richardson, Royal Statistical Society president (online)

Thursday 29th April 2021

Location: Remotely by invite. See Royal Statistical Society main events page

15:15-15:30: Login

15:30-15:40 Chair of the Leeds/Bradford Group

Introductions

15:40-16:40 Prof Sylvia Richardson, President of the Royal Statistical Society and Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge University

(Presentation might be available, after the event)

(Presentation will be available on RSS YouTube channel in the local-group's playlist)

Tackling COVID-19: Statistics in action
In this talk, my aim is first to look back at 2020 and 2021 and review the multi-facet engagement of statisticians and the RSS in the Covid-19 crisis. I will highlight different aspects of the work of the RSS Covid-19 Task Force and briefly describe the RSS-Turing engagement with the Joint Biosecurity Centre.

In a second part, I will focus on the statistical issues related to the evaluation and deployment of rapid diagnostic tests. One key area where rapid tests have been deployed is schools, and I will describe how this has motived some recent simulation work to understand the relative merits of different policies of deployment of rapid testing in schools.

In my final remarks, I will move away from Covid-19 and look towards the future landscape for statistics in the fast-moving world of data science. I will give a brief update on an initiative, launched in January, which aims to develop at pace a strategy of visible engagement of the RSS with the ecosystem of Data Science, building on the strong growth in this area and the central position of statistics