Rate My Professor Martyn Plummer

Professor Martyn Plummer serves as Professor and Head of the Department of Statistics within the Faculty of Science at the University of Warwick. As an applied statistician, his research spans medical research and public health, with specific focuses in biostatistics, cancer epidemiology, statistical computing, and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Before assuming his current role at Warwick, Plummer held positions at prominent institutions. From 1990 to 1995, he worked at the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge. Subsequently, from 1995 to 2018, he was based at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, where the majority of his work centered on infections and cancer. His transition to Warwick marked a return to the UK academic environment, where he now leads the department and contributes to teaching modules including Visualisation and Communication of Data (ST237) and Generalised Linear Models for Regression and Classification (ST346).

Plummer's influence in statistical computing is profound. He is the lead author and maintainer of JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler), an open-source program for Bayesian graphical modeling using Gibbs sampling, introduced in his 2003 proceedings paper 'JAGS: A program for analysis of Bayesian graphical models using Gibbs sampling.' This tool has been widely adopted across disciplines such as ecology, genetics, and management. As a member of the R Core Team, he has advanced the R ecosystem for statistical computing. Plummer served as co-president of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing for ten years. His scholarly output includes impactful epidemiological studies, such as 'Global burden of cancers attributable to infections in 2012: a synthetic analysis' (2016, The Lancet Oncology), 'Sero-prevalence of 19 infectious pathogens and associated factors among middle-aged and elderly Chinese adults' (2022), and 'Helicobacter pylori multiplex serology and risk of non-cardia gastric cancer' (2023). Recent contributions feature 'Simulation-Based Bayesian Analysis' (2023, Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application) and 'Past, Present and Future of Software for Bayesian Inference' (2024, Statistical Science). He holds membership on the University of Warwick Senate, representing Statistics. Plummer's work bridges methodological innovation and applied epidemiology, enhancing global understanding of infection-related cancers and Bayesian inference practices.