Professor Sir John Aston is the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge and is the Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life.
John is an applied statistician with 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 also leads research into the use of quantitative evidence in public policy making, works with those in public life to ensure the best methods are used, and aims to improve the use of statistics and other quantitative evidence in public policy debates.
John is a non-executive board member of the UK Statistics Authority and from 2017-2020 was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office and Director-General for Science, Technology, Analysis, Research and Strategy. He was a founding director of the Alan Turing Institute. He is a member of the London Policing Board and president-elect of the Royal Statistical Society, where he will serve as president in 2025-26. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, John held academic positions at the University of Warwick and at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. John was knighted in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to statistics and public policymaking.