Rosemary Bailey

Affiliation: Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Rosemary Bailey grew up in the countryside northwest of London. In primary school, her classmates mocked her for being good at arithmetic. When she told her parents this, they each told her she should decide for herself who she wanted to be and never take notice of such comments.

Bailey’s first job was as a technician in the Medical Research Council’s Air Pollution Research Unit. She entered data and helped analyze it in the pre-computer age. Her second job was as a mathematics and French teacher at Queen Elizabeth School in Ilorin, Nigeria, working with Voluntary Service Overseas. The volunteers had two weeks’ training in teaching, and Bailey had to pick up French on the spot after the French teacher left.

Bailey’s first and second degrees were in mathematics at Oxford University. Her DPhil thesis was about finite permutation groups and supervised by Graham Higman. He warned her there were few university positions for algebraists at that time.

Fortunately, Bailey was able to obtain a Science Research Council postdoctoral research fellowship in the statistics department at the University of Edinburgh. Its purpose was to apply knowledge of permutation groups to problems in randomization of experiments. Under the supervision of Desmond Patterson of the Agricultural Research Council’s statistics unit, she converted herself to a statistician, learning about design of experiments by immersing herself in R. A. Fisher, Frank Yates, and John Nelder’s papers; listening to her colleagues; and teaching an MSc course on the subject.

Wanting to gain practical experience in real experiments, Bailey joined the statistics department of Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1981, intending to stay for two years. She ended up staying for 10, however.

In 1991, she moved back into academia, serving as a mathematical sciences professor at Goldsmiths College in the University of London and then statistics professor at Queen Mary University of London. In both places, Bailey spent four years as head of department or school. After retiring from Queen Mary University of London in 2012, she took up a part-time position at the University of St. Andrews.

Much of Bailey’s research is motivated by real experiments. She maintains contact with experimenters in the biological sciences (including agriculture, ecology, and medicine), sometimes as a coauthor and sometimes less formally. In 2006–2007, she was a member of the Royal Statistical Society’s Working Party on Statistical Issues in First-in-Man Studies following a trial that went badly. After that, she devised more efficient designs for such trials.

Bailey was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2015. In May of 2011, she gave a Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution, titled “From Rothamsted to Northwick Park: Designing Experiments to Avoid Bias and Reduce Variance.” Her many positions on committees of professional organizations include being president of the British Region of the International Biometric Society from 2000–2002.