The David Blackwell Lectures: 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.  

We are delighted to have Professor Gil McVean give this year's lecture.

Title:           The trajectories of complex disease

Abstract:  The analysis of longitudinal data from electronic health records (EHRs) has the potential to improve clinical diagnosis and enable personalised medicine, motivating efforts to identify disease commonalities and subtypes from patient comorbidity information and other modalities. We have developed an age-dependent topic-modelling (ATM) method that provides a low-rank representation of longitudinal records of hundreds of distinct diseases in large EHR datasets and applied it to c. 300,000 individuals from UK Biobank and >200,000 individuals from the All of Us program. A surprisingly small number of disease trajectories capture known and novel combinations of disorders that occur throughout life and identify disease subtypes that occur in multiple topics, with differential genetic risk profiles. Such stratification improves understanding of patient risk and heterogeneity, leading to better identification of genetic risk, characterisation of pathological pathways and the discovery of new therapeutic targets.

Bio: Gil McVean is Principal Scientist at the Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford, working with the Pathogen Mission and other programs to drive innovation and delivery in the use of genomic data to improve health. Previously, he was Founder and President of Genomics plc, a spin-out from Oxford University, that uses vast genomic resources to provide the services and products to support drug development and improve healthcare through enhanced prevention and early detection. With a background in genomics, statistics and evolutionary biology, Gil has played a leading role in driving the science and application of population-scale genomics. He had central roles in the International HapMap and 1000 Genomes Projects, contributed to the development of UK Biobank and Genomics England and has worked with industrial, academic and clinical organisations across the world to realise the value of genomics. He was the founding director of the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute and has worked on problems from dissecting the molecular basis of pathogenesis in multiple sclerosis, to the genomic surveillance of malaria and the landscape of human recombination. Gil’s contributions to science have been recognised through election as a fellow to both the Royal Society (2016) and the Academy of Medical Sciences (2016) and through the role of President of the Genetics Society (2025-2028). He won the Francis Crick Prize in 2010 and was awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize in 2012.

A Drinks Reception will follow the Lecture in the ground floor social area.  Please register for this event here.