David John Finney CBE FRS FRSE (3 January 1917 – 12 November 2018), was a British statistician[1][2] and Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Edinburgh.
He became assistant to Frank Yates at Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1939, where there was great emphasis on increasing productivity of agriculture and he was involved in the design of field experiments and the interpretation of their results.
In 1945, he joined the University of Oxford as the first holder of the post of Lecturer in the Design and Analysis of Scientific Experiment.
[9] After returning from India, he moved to the University of Aberdeen where he became Reader in Statistics and also established a Unit of Statistics funded by the Agricultural Research Council, which was to provide a service for Scotland modelled on that provided by Rothamsted for England.
In 2002 he returned to contact with the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, which published an anthology of his writings about statistical methods and drug safety.