The Department of Statistics is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Christl Donnelly CBE FMedSci FRS to the Chair of Applied Statistics. Professor Donnelly will take up the post with effect from 1st August 2018 and will be a fellow of St Peter's College. Christl Donnelly is a statistician and epidemiologist studying the spread and control of infectious diseases, with a particular interest in outbreaks. She studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Oberlin College and biostatistics as a graduate student at Harvard School of Public Health, graduating in 1992. She worked in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of Edinburgh from 1992 to 1995 and in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Epidemiology of Infectious Disease (Department of Zoology, University of Oxford) from 1995 to 2000. Since 2000, she has worked at Imperial College London where she is Professor of Statistical Epidemiology.  Christl has studied Zika virus, Ebola, MERS, influenza, SARS, bovine TB, foot-and-mouth disease, rabies, cholera, dengue, BSE/vCJD, malaria and HIV/AIDS. She was a leading member of the WHO Ebola Response Team (2014-2016). She was also deputy chair of the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB (1998-2007) which designed, oversaw and analysed the Randomised Badger Culling Trial. In addition to epidemiology and disease control, she has applied interests in conservation and animal welfare. She was awarded a CBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours for her work on epidemiology and control of infectious diseases.