Sir Adrian Smith

Keble Honorary Fellow
President of The Royal Society
Knighted for services to science 2011

Adrian Smith became President of the Royal Society in 2020, having been elected a Fellow in 2001. He is a mathematician with expertise in Bayesian statistics and his comprehensive publications on diverse areas of that branch of statistics have had a major impact on statistical practice in a wide range of disciplines and application areas. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1995–1997.

Adrian was born in Dawlish, Devon in 1946 and attended Teignmouth Grammar School, subsequently reading Mathematics at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He then spent three postgraduate years at University College London, where he obtained an MSc and PhD in Mathematical Statistics.

In 1971, he was appointed to a Lectureship in the Oxford University Mathematics Institute, held in conjunction with the role of Mathematics Fellow at Keble College. He was the youngest of the College’s Fellows at that time and raised the occasional eyebrow by appearing at High Table in jeans and a leather jacket. He looks back on his three years at Keble as providing invaluable insights into how to coexist with a diverse range of clever, opinionated fellow human beings. He subsequently moved to a series of academic posts at University College London, Nottingham University, and Imperial College.

In 1998, he left his academic career behind to become Principal of Queen Mary, University of London. He then had another major career change in 2008, recruited into the Civil Service as Director General for Science and Research, the most senior civil servant overseeing the policy and funding of UK research. In that capacity, he served the last two years of the then Labour Government under Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the first two years of the Conservative-LibDem Coalition Government under David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

Adrian then left the Civil Service to return to academic leadership as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London Federation from 2012–2018, during which time, in 2014, he was made an Honorary Fellow of Keble. Most recently, from 2018–2023, he was Director of the Alan Turing Institute.