Rate My Professor John Aston

Professor Sir John Aston is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge and the Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life. He is an applied statistician whose work focuses on statistical neuroimaging, official statistics, statistical linguistics, and the use of quantitative evidence in public policy making. His methodological interests include functional and object data analysis, time series analysis, image analysis, changepoint analysis, and spatial-temporal statistics. Aston earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in statistics from Imperial College London and McGill University. Prior to his current roles at Cambridge, he held academic positions at the University of Warwick and Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and he served as a NISS Junior Fellow at the United States Census Bureau.

Aston was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office and Director-General for Science, Technology, Analysis, Research and Strategy from 2017 to 2020. He is a non-executive director of the UK Statistics Authority and was a founding director of the Alan Turing Institute. He serves as President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2025–26 and is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. In 2024 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was knighted in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to statistics and public policymaking. Aston has contributed to major public policy efforts, including serving on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.