Professor Sir John Aston is Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life at the University of Cambridge. Professor Aston is an applied statistician with particular interest in statistical neuroimaging, official statistics and statistical linguistics. He has methodological interests in functional and object data analysis, time series and image analysis, and spatial-temporal statistics. Aston also leads research into the use of quantitative evidence in public policy making, works with those in public life to ensure the best methods are used, and aims to improve the use of statistics and other quantitative evidence in public policy debates. Aston is a non-executive board member of the UK Statistics Authority and from 2017–20 was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office and Director-General for Science, Technology, Analysis, Research and Strategy. He was a founding director of the Alan Turing Institute. He is a member of the London Policing Board and president-elect of the Royal Statistical Society, where he will serve as president in 2025–26. Prior to joining Cambridge, Aston held academic positions at the University of Warwick and at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Aston was knighted in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to statistics and public policymaking.

Also elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society this year was Ingrid Daubechies, a Belgian–American mathematician whose work focuses on applications of mathematics to a wide range of fields. Daubechies started her career in mathematical physics, branching out to signal analysis a few years after her Ph.D. Her construction of bases of wavelets supported on finite intervals not only solved fundamental mathematical problems, but also had a large impact on signal and image processing; some of her work is used in the image compression standard JPEG-2000. She has played a unique role in making wavelets a practical basic tool of applied mathematics with major impacts on medical imaging, remote sensing, and digital photography, and she has also introduced sophisticated mathematical techniques to art conservation and evolutionary biology.

Read more at https://royalsociety.org/fellows-directory/.