Bernard W. Silverman is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Oxford.  He is currently President of the Royal Statistical Society and is a past president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and has just completed a term as Editor of Annals of Statistics. His research interests are currently in statistical aspects of human genetics and climate change, and he holds research appointments at Oxford in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and the Smith School for Enterprise and Environment.   He continues his long-term research interests in computational statistics, especially in smoothing methods and functional data analysis.