David Cox

Sir David Cox was a British statistician whose work fundamentally shaped modern applied statistics, spending his career at Cambridge, Birkbeck College London, Imperial College London and Oxford University, where he served as Warden of Nuffield College from 1988 to 1994. Cox is best known for developing the Cox proportional hazards model, introduced in a 1972 paper, a regression method for survival analysis that estimates how covariates affect the hazard, or instantaneous risk, of an event such as death or failure occurring, without requiring the underlying baseline hazard to be specified, and the model became one of the most widely used statistical tools in medical research. Cox also made foundational contributions to logistic regression as a method for modeling binary outcomes, and with George Box he developed the Box-Cox transformation for stabilizing variance and improving the fit of statistical models. He was the first recipient of the International Prize in Statistics in 2016 and received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 2010, and across his career he authored or co-authored more than three hundred papers and books.