Congratulations to Simon Tavaré, from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, upon his election as a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.  This is a tremendous honour, as Foreign Associates constitute only a small fraction of the Academy, and the bar for election is exceptionally high. 

Simon’s citation is as follows: Tavaré works at the interface of the mathematical sciences and the biological and medical sciences.  He pioneered probabilistic and statistical aspects of coalescent theory, full likelihood-based methods for sequence variation data, methods for ancestral inference, evolutionary approaches to cancer, and approximate Bayesian computation for inference in complex stochastic processes.

Also elected as a Foreign Associate this year was CRUK Chief Scientist Karen Vousden.