Professor Sylvia Richardson is Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit and holds the Chair of Biostatistics in the University of Cambridge since 2012. She is currently an ATI fellow and President elect of the Royal Statistical Society. She has worked extensively on statistical methodology and applications to the health sciences. Her main interest is centred on modelling and computational aspects of Bayesian statistics applied to complex-highly structured biological and epidemiological data sets. Her recent research has focussed on the analysis of large data problems such as those arising in genomics and on developing methods and scalable algorithms for clustering, sparse regression and large scale hierarchical analysis of high dimensional biomedical and multi-omics data.