Home Office picks Aston for head scientist job

A leading researcher in applied statistics from the University of Cambridge has been named chief scientific adviser for the Home Office.

John Aston, a former trustee of the Alan Turing Institute, will take up the post on 4 September.

Aston is co-director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Centre for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Multimodal Clinical Imaging Data at the University of Cambridge. He has previously held academic posts at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the University of Warwick. His research interests are in statistical neuroimaging and statistical linguistics.