Richard Peto

Professor of Medical Statistics & Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. In 1975, he set up the CTSU, of which he and Rory Collins are now co-directors. Professor Peto's work has included studies of the causes of cancer in general, and of the effects of smoking in particular, and the establishment of large-scale randomised trials of the treatment of heart disease, stroke, cancer and a variety of other diseases.

He has been instrumental in introducing combined 'meta-analyses' of results from related trials that achieve uniquely reliable assessment of treatment effects. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1989, and was knighted (for services to epidemiology and to cancer prevention) in 1999.