David John Hand is a British statistician

Statistician

A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...

. His research interests include multivariate statistics

Multivariate statistics

Multivariate statistics is a form of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one statistical variable. The application of multivariate statistics is multivariate analysis...

, classification methods, pattern recognition

Pattern recognition

In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...

, the computational statistics

Computational statistics

Computational statistics, or statistical computing, is the interface between statistics and computer science. It is the area of computational science specific to the mathematical science of statistics....

 and the foundations of statistics

Foundations of statistics

Foundations of statistics is the usual name for the epistemological debate in statistics over how one should conduct inductive inference from data...

.

Hand was a professor of statistics at the Open University

Open University

The Open University is a distance learning and research university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom...

 from 1988 until 1999, when he moved to Imperial College London

Imperial College London

Imperial College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom, specialising in science, engineering, business and medicine...

. He was awarded the Guy Medal

Guy Medal

The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Gold Medal is awarded triennially, the other two are awarded annually...

 in Silver by the Royal Statistical Society

Royal Statistical Society

The Royal Statistical Society is a learned society for statistics and a professional body for statisticians in the UK.-History:It was founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London , though a perhaps unrelated London Statistical Society was in existence at least as early as 1824...

 in 2002 and served as its President in 2008–9, then again from in 2010 after Bernard Silverman

Bernard Silverman

Bernard Silverman FRS is a British statistician. He was Master of St Peter's College, Oxford from 1 October 2003 to 31 December 2009...

 stood down. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003.