From 1990, he was professor of applied statistics at the University of Oxford and also a professorial fellow at St Peter's College.
His work on artificial neural networks in the 1990s helped to bring aspects of machine learning and data mining to the attention of statistical audiences.
[2] He emphasised the value of robust statistics in his books Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks and Modern Applied Statistics with S. Ripley helped develop the S-PLUS programming language[3][4] and its open source derivative R.[5] He co-authored two books based on S, S Programming and Modern Applied Statistics with S.[3][4] Since mid-1997 he is a member of the "R Core Team"[6] and from 2000 to 2021 he was one of the most active committers to the R core.
The university also awarded him the Adams Prize in 1987 for an essay entitled Statistical Inference for Spatial Processes, later published as a book.
[11] He served on the faculty of Imperial College, London from 1976 until 1983, at which point he moved to the University of Strathclyde.