Lon Cardon is Professor of Bioinformatics and a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellow in Oxford. He is a statistical geneticist of international repute. He has built his research reputation by using, understanding, developing and creating statistical methodologies to locate genes influencing common human diseases. He has worked on a wide range of disorders including dyslexia, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, asthma, osteoporosis and inflammatory bowel disease. He and his associates have pioneered a number of approaches that are now in widespread use. Examples include the application of interval-mapping or multipoint linkage to human diseases, the use of precise phenotypic selection to increase power and the MERLIN and QTDT computer programs. His current interest is in linkage disequilibrium and he is again in the vanguard of international efforts, contributing the first two chromosome wide maps of linkage disequilibrium, and making major contributions to the HapMap project. This work has revealed exciting new features of the human genome which require traditional interpretations to be reconsidered. In addition to these ground breaking contributions, Professor Cardon makes a very significant contribution to the wider scientific community, serving on a number of advisory boards and funding agency panels in the United Kingdom and abroad.