NCRM is very sorry to hear of the death of our former Director, Prof Chris Skinner. Chris was the founder of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and was its Director from 2004-2009. He was an enthusiastic supporter of methodological innovation and fostered an effective collegiality among the staff of NCRM’s ‘hub’ and ‘nodes’. He played a big part in the development of statistics at the University Southampton, which he joined as a lecturer in 1978, and where he later obtained his PhD.
He rose rapidly and was made Professor of Statistics in 1994. He acted as both Head of Department of Social Statistics and Demography and Director of the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute. In 2011 he moved to take up a position at the London School of Economics, where he became Head of Department. He made important contributions to the development of methods for inference in the presence of non?response and measurement errors and for the analysis of complex survey data. Later he extended his research to statistical disclosure control, confidentiality and privacy.
Chris is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed articles in statistical journals and the co-editor of two influential books on the analysis of survey data. He served on many methodology advisory boards which led to significant improvements to survey statistics world-wide and specifically in the UK. He received numerous awards and honours for his outstanding contributions to survey sampling and social statistics and was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to the social sciences. He will be much missed, and our thoughts are with his family at this time. Chris was recently interviewed for the International Statistical Review – and this article can be found here.