Nicky Best

Nicola G. "Nicky" Best is a statistician known for her work on the deviance information criterion in Bayesian inference[B][E] and as a developer of Bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling.[1][A][D] She is a former professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Imperial College London and is currently a biostatistician for GlaxoSmithKline.[2]

Education and career

Best earned a master's degree in medical statistics from the University of Leicester in 1990[2] and then a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Cambridge. She joined the Imperial College faculty in 1996.[1] She moved from Imperial to GlaxoSmithKline in 2014.[2]

She was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), from 2001 to 2004.[3]

Recognition

Best won the Guy Medal in Bronze of the Royal Statistical Society in 2004.[4] In 2018, she won the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society "for her exquisite expositions of Bayesian methods through BUGS software, workshops, lectures, prior elicitations, textbooks and peer-review publications; and for substantive applications ranging from clinical trials and cost-effectiveness to epidemiology and, most recently, the optimization of pharmaceutical research programmes".[5]

Selected publications
A.Lunn, David J.; Thomas, Andrew; Best, Nicky; Spiegelhalter, David (2000), "WinBUGS – A Bayesian modelling framework: Concepts, structure, and extensibility", Statistics and Computing, Springer Nature, 10 (4): 325–337, doi:10.1023/a:1008929526011
B.Spiegelhalter, David J.; Best, Nicola G.; Carlin, Bradley P.; van der Linde, Angelika (October 2002), "Bayesian measures of model complexity and fit", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Statistical Methodology), Wiley, 64 (4): 583–639, doi:10.1111/1467-9868.00353
C.Plummer, Martyn; Best, Nicky; Cowles, Kate; Vines, Karen (2006), "CODA: convergence diagnosis and output analysis for MCMC", R News, 6 (1): 7–11
D.Lunn, David; Spiegelhalter, David; Thomas, Andrew; Best, Nicky (July 2009), "The BUGS project: Evolution, critique and future directions", Statistics in Medicine, Wiley, 28 (25): 3049–3067, doi:10.1002/sim.3680, PMID 19630097
E.Spiegelhalter, David J.; Best, Nicola G.; Carlin, Bradley P.; van der Linde, Angelika (April 2014), "The deviance information criterion: 12 years on", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Statistical Methodology), Wiley, 76 (3): 485–493, doi:10.1111/rssb.12062
gollark: I am leaving off the second half so as not to fill more than a screen or so.
gollark: No, Richard, it's 'Linux', not 'GNU/Linux'. The most important contributions that the FSF made to Linux were the creation of the GPL and the GCC compiler. Those are fine and inspired products. GCC is a monumental achievement and has earned you, RMS, and the Free Software Foundation countless kudos and much appreciation.Following are some reasons for you to mull over, including some already answered in your FAQ.One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS -- more on this later). He named it 'Linux' with a little help from his friends. Why doesn't he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff -- including the software I wrote using GCC -- and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don't want to be known as a nag, do you?(An operating system) != (a distribution). Linux is an operating system. By my definition, an operating system is that software which provides and limits access to hardware resources on a computer. That definition applies whereever you see Linux in use. However, Linux is usually distributed with a collection of utilities and applications to make it easily configurable as a desktop system, a server, a development box, or a graphics workstation, or whatever the user needs. In such a configuration, we have a Linux (based) distribution. Therein lies your strongest argument for the unwieldy title 'GNU/Linux' (when said bundled software is largely from the FSF). Go bug the distribution makers on that one. Take your beef to Red Hat, Mandrake, and Slackware. At least there you have an argument. Linux alone is an operating system that can be used in various applications without any GNU software whatsoever. Embedded applications come to mind as an obvious example.
gollark: Oh, wait, better idea.
gollark: Hey, I *said* (GNU[+/])Linux, isn't that good enough for you, Stallman?!
gollark: Yep!

References
  1. "Nicky Best", Speaker biographies, ESF 2014, retrieved 2019-09-13
  2. "Professor Nicky Best", Industry and innovation case studies, The Royal Society, retrieved 2019-09-13
  3. Professor Nicky Best: Honours and Memberships, Imperial College London, retrieved 2019-09-13
  4. "Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews, retrieved 2019-09-13
  5. "RSS announces recipients of 2018 honours", StatsLife, Royal Statistical Society, 22 January 2018, retrieved 2019-09-13
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