Sir David Cox was an Honorary Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and was affiliated with the Department of Statistics at Oxford. He received a Masters of Arts from St. John’s College, Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds. After working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and Wool Industries Research Association, he held academic positions at Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London. In 1966 he became Professor of Statistics, and then in 1970 was named Head of the Mathematics Department at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Sir David Cox was a former Warden (1988-94) of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was a Fellow and former Member of Council of the Royal Society. He was editor of Biometrika from 1966 to 1991.
Sir David Cox held a number of awards, including honorary Fellowships at St John’s College, Cambridge, and the British Academy, and the degree of D.Sc. from a number of universities. He had also been awarded the Weldon Memorial Prize from the University of Oxford, the Kettering Prize and Gold Medal for Cancer Research, the Guy Medal (in Silver and in Gold) from the Royal Statistical Society, the George Box Medal, the Copley Medal, and the Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation. He is a Foreign Honorary Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2016, he received the first-ever International Prize in Statistics.
Additionally, Cox was a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He had been President of the Bernoulli Society, the Royal Statistical Society, and the International Statistical Institute. He was the author or co-author of sixteen books and roughly 250 papers. His work on the proportional hazards regression model is one of the most-cited and most influential papers in modern statistics.
