Biography: Professor Sir Richard Peto

Professor of Medical Statistics & Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. In 1975, he set up the CTSU, of which he and Rory Collins are now co-directors. Professor Peto's work has included studies of the causes of cancer in general, and of the effects of smoking in particular, and the establishment of large-scale randomised trials of the treatment of heart disease, stroke, cancer and a variety of other diseases. He has been instrumental in introducing combined 'meta-analyses' of results from related trials that achieve uniquely reliable assessment of treatment effects. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1989, and was knighted (for services to epidemiology and to cancer prevention) in 1999. Professor Peto is joint statistician for HPS with Dr Sarah Parish.