Professor Daniel Williamson

I am a Bayesian statistician and "Professor of Uncertainty Quantification" in the Land Environment Economics and Policy Institute within the Department of Economics. I also served as faculty within the department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2013-2023. I suppose I could also be called "Professor of Bayesian Statistics" or "Professor of Data Science", but you have to settle on one title in the end. I have always been interested in decision making under uncertainty, with a particular focus on what uncertainty means (to analyst and decision maker), how to quantify it, how to use it to guide decision makers and when it is ethical to do so. A feature in the vast majority of my work has been the presence of one or more expensive computer simulators (or "models") of the aspects of reality we are uncertain about, and most of my application work has been with environmental models (e.g. atmosphere, ocean, land ice, coupled GCMs, land surface, crop growth). I am a subjectivist, so I think uncertainty is nothing more than a property of individuals, probability is one possible calculus for its quantification and communication, and “true randomness” may or may not exist, but it doesn’t really matter. I am also a Dad, a chess player, a cyclist, a (beginner) sea-kayaker and I play fantasy football (without any statistical modelling at all).