The Fisher Memorial Lectures

The Fisher Memorial Lectures are organised by the Fisher Memorial Trust to encourage discussion within and between the scientific fields in which R. A. Fisher was active. The Trust also offers travel bursaries to junior researchers wishing to pursue scientific activities in these areas.

Lectures in statistics.

1966 F. Yates. Computers, the second revolution in statistics.
1972 G. A. Barnard. Statistical inference and its historical development.
1978 D. J. Finney. Bioassay and the practice of statistical inference.
1984 D. R. Cox. Regression and the design of experiments.
1986 S. M. Stigler. Francis Galton and the unravelling of the normal world.
1988 G. E. Box. Quality improvement, an expanding domain for the application of scientific method.
1992 D. Lindley. Statistics of the market place.
1995 M. J. R. Healy. The life and work of Frank Yates.
1996 J. A. Nelder. Computers and statistics: the continuing revolution.
1998 Sir John Kingman. Mathematics of genetic diversity: before and after DNA.
2000 B. Efron. The essential Fisher.
2001 Sir Richard Doll. Proof of causality: Deductions from epidemiological evidence.
2004 A. Smith. Towards an evidence-based society: the role of statistical thinking.
2008 R. A. Bailey. Design of dose-escalation trials.
2011 P. Dawid. Causal inference from experimental data.
2013 D. Spiegelhalter. Putting life into numbers: the highs and lows of communicating statistics.
2015 P. McCullagh. Empirical phenomena and universal laws.
2016 N. Reid. Statistical science and data science: where do we go from here?
2017 S. Senn. And thereby hangs a tail: the strange history of P-values.
2022 K. Mardia. Fisher's legacy of multivariate analysis, statistics on manifolds, and beyond.
2024 W. Rosenberger. From Fisher to CARA: the evolution of randomization and randomization-based inference.

The Fisher Memorial Trust committee

Rosemary Bailey
Heather Battey
Walter Bodmer
Brian Charlesworth (chair)
Andrew Mead (secretary)
Stephen Senn (treasurer)
Ian Tomlinson
Christina Yap (deputy treasurer)

Lectures in genetics.

1968 R. R. Race. Blood groups in human genetics.
1969 E. A. Cornish. Developments from the Fisher-Cornish expansions.
1970 K. Mather. Biometrical genetics.
1974 L. L. Cavalli-Sforza. Cultural versus biological evolution.
1977 R. Hide. Motions in planetary fluids.
1981 J. Maynard Smith. The evolution of the sex ratio.
1981 J. H. Bennett. R. A. Fisher and The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.
1983 S. Karlin. Kin selection and altruism.
1990 Sir Walter Bodmer. Genetic sequences.
1993 A. J. Jeffreys. Molecular sleuthing: the story of genetic fingerprinting.
1994 A. W. F. Edwards. Fiducial inference and the fundamental theorem of natural selection.
2002 O. Mayo. The realisation of Fisher's research programme.
2003 W. Ewens. Statistics and the transformation from genetics to genomics.
2006 E. A. Thompson. 1953: an unrecognized summit in human genetic linkage analysis.
2010 B. Charlesworth and D. Charlesworth. Fisher and modern evolutionary genetics.
2012 P. Donnelly. Genetic variation in human health and disease.
2014 W. Hill. Applying quantitative genetic and genomic information to animal improvement.
2018 J. Felsenstein. Is there a more fundamental theorem of natural selection?
2018 M. Goddard. The genetic architecture of complex traits.
2019 B. Cullis and A. Smith. Design Tableau.
2025 C. Rotimi. The complex and dynamic evolutionary history of African genomes in health and disease.