Professor David Blackwell (1919 – 2010) was a distinguished American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem and became the first African-American elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences. As a Department, we wanted to mark his ground-breaking work and are delighted to hold this annual lecture named after him in October each year.
Past Lectures
2026
Thursday 29th January
Speaker: Michael I. Jordan, Inria Paris and the University of California, Berkeley
2024
Thursday 24th October
Speaker: Professor Gil McVean, Ellison Institute of Technology, Oxford
2023
Thursday 26th October
Speaker: Professor Eric J Tchetgen Tchetgen
Title: Introducing the Forster-Warmuth Nonparametric Counterfactual Regression
2022
Friday 21st October
Speaker: Professor Sir Peter Donnelly
Title: A path to personalised disease prevention: using genomics to predict risk for common diseases
2021
Speaker: John Jumper, Senior Research Scientist, DeepMind
2020
Speaker: Jason Forrest, Director of Interactive Data Visualization, McKinsey & Co, New York
Title: Exploring the Data Visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois
Abstract: At the 1900 Paris Exposition, an all African-American team lead by scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois sought to challenge and recontextualize the perception of African-Americans at the dawn of the 20th-century. In less than 5 months, his team conducted sociological research and hand-made more than 60 large data visualization posters for a massive European audience which ultimately awarded Du Bois a gold medal for his efforts. While relatively obscure until recently, the ramification of his landmark work remains challenging and especially important in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.