University of Sheffield

Tony O'Hagan - Academic pages


Professor A. O'Hagan


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Emeritus Professor of Statistics, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Sheffield

Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis

Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society


Biographical information (academic)

I obtained my BSc (1969) and PhD (1974) in Statistics from the University of London. Between these two bouts of study, I worked for two years as a practising statistician at the Central Electricity Generating Board. I began my academic career at the University of Dundee in 1973, moving to Warwick University in 1975. I became Professor of Statistics at the University of Nottingham in 1990 and moved to Sheffield in 1999. In 2008 I formally retired from my post at Sheffield, but stayed on part-time until September 2012 to complete the "Managing Uncertainty in Complex Models" project. I now have the honorary title of Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield.

I have been able to serve the academic statistics community in a variety of capacities. In particular, I have served on the Research Section Committee and the Council of the Royal Statistical Society, and the Board of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. I have been a member of the Peer Review College of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the College of Experts of the Medical Research Council. I was a member of the editorial board of Significance Magazine for ten years from its beginning in 2004.

Being retired from academic work frees me to be more active as a consultant to government and industry.


Research interests

My research is in the theory and applications of Bayesian statistics. My main areas of research and consulting activity are in the elicitation of expert knowledge, in managing and quantifying uncertainty in the use of complex mechanistic models, and in Bayesian modelling generally. I have been involved in many application areas, particularly in medicine, metrology, environmental statistics, asset management and health economics.


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Last updated: 23 February 2023
Maintained by: Tony O'Hagan