Professor Deborah Ashby is Director of the School of Public Health at Imperial College London where she holds the Chair in Medical Statistics and Clinical Trials, and was Founding Co-Director of Imperial Clinical Trials Unit. She is a Chartered Statistician and her research interests are in clinical trials, risk-benefit decision making for medicines, and the utility of Bayesian approaches in these areas.

She is currently President of the Royal Statistical Society. She has sat on the UK Commission on Human Medicines and acted as adviser to the European Medicines Agency. She has recently chaired the Population Research Committee for Cancer Research UK and the National Institute for Health Research HTA Commissioning Board, and was Deputy Chair of the HTA Programme. Deborah was awarded the OBE for services to medicine in 2009, appointed an NIHR Senior Investigator in 2010, and elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2012.