Nicola G. "Nicky" Best is a statistician known for her work on the deviance information criterion in Bayesian inference[B][E] and as a developer of Bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling.
[1][A][D] She is a former professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Imperial College London and is currently a biostatistician for GlaxoSmithKline.
[2] Best earned a master's degree in medical statistics from the University of Leicester in 1990[2] and then a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Cambridge, supervised by David Spiegelhalter.
[4] Best won the Guy Medal in Bronze of the Royal Statistical Society in 2004.
[5] In 2018, she won the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society "for her exquisite expositions of Bayesian methods through BUGS software, workshops, lectures, prior elicitations, textbooks and peer-review publications; and for substantive applications ranging from clinical trials and cost-effectiveness to epidemiology and, most recently, the optimization of pharmaceutical research programmes".