Gareth Roberts (statistician)


Gareth Owen Roberts FRS is a statistician and applied probabilist. He is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Director of the Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology at the University of Warwick. He is an established authority on the stability of Markov chains, especially applied to Markov chain Monte Carlo theory methodology for a wide range of latent statistical models with applications in spatial statistics, infectious disease epidemiology and finance.

Education

Roberts was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, graduating in 1985 in Mathematics and subsequently went on to complete in 1988 a PhD thesis on Some boundary hitting problems for diffusion processes under the supervision of Saul Jacka at the University of Warwick.

Career

Following his PhD, Roberts held various academic positions at the University of Nottingham, the University of Cambridge and Lancaster University before returning to the University of Warwick. He was a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge from 1992 to 1998.
Roberts is a talented tournament bridge player, whose achievements include winning the Great Northern Swiss Pairs in 1997, and the Garden Cities Trophy in 2008 and 2013.

Awards and honours

His nomination to become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013 reads: