Sylvia Richardson is Director of the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge and has made several seminal contributions to statistics in biomedicine. Her research focuses on integrative Bayesian analysis in epidemiology, systems biology and genomics, and in developing methods and computational tools for the analysis of high dimensional biomedical data. These themes are extremely important in modern biomedical research, due to the rapidly increasing availability of complex, high-dimensional datasets deriving from clinical trials, DNA sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics and imaging, and her extensive track record places her at the forefront of statistical developments in this domain.