Richard D. Gill

Richard David Gill (born 11 September 1951) is a British-Dutch mathematician and professor emeritus at Leiden University. He has held academic positions in the Netherlands. As a probability theorist and statistician, Gill has researched counting processes. He is also known for his consulting and advocacy on behalf of alleged victims of statistical misrepresentation, including the reversal of the murder conviction of a Dutch nurse who had been jailed for six years.

Education Gill was born in 1951 in Redhill, Surrey, England.

He subsequently moved to the Netherlands, where he married his Dutch wife,

Gill has said that he was "not much of an activist" as a student, but now feels guilty about not speaking up more at the time about perceived injustices, saying that this is partly because of an incident when working as a statistician in the 1970s when he helped on an experiment that severed the front legs of rats to investigate whether it would lead to the reshaping of their skulls. Gill said that this incident has stayed with him, as "what upset me most is that I didn’t have the strength of character to refuse to do that job". Between 1979 and 1982, he was also part-time research associate at Interfaculty for Actuarial Science and Econometrics of the VU Amsterdam.

Gill became head of the Mathematical Statistics Department at the CWI in 1983. From 1986 to 1990, he also served as a special professor (Dutch: "bijzonder hoogleraar") at Leiden University. He retired from Leiden in 2017. During his career Gill has supervised 24 doctoral students, including Sara van de Geer and Mark van der Laan (co-advised by Peter Bickel).

Gill became a citizen of the Netherlands in 1996. Gill also said in a 2021 lecture that he suspects Beverley Allitt is innocent, and in a 2020 paper said the case "deserves fresh study". Gill states that his original involvement in campaigning for nurses stemmed from his wife encouraging him to get involved in the De Berk case, recounting her saying "They’re using statistics; you should get involved, do something useful". Gill and other professional statisticians showed this statistical testimony to be fallacious. After a campaign in which Gill helped, a retrial was ordered and De Berk was found not guilty; she received a public apology from the Dutch government, which also began negotiating financial compensation.

Gill's challenge of statistical evidence played a role in securing Daniela Poggiali's acquittal on murder charges in Italy in 2021.

Benjamin Geen's applications for a retrial have been rejected and in 2013 and 2015 Gill and other statisticians asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to look into his case. The appeals were unsuccessful.

In 2022 Gill contributed to a peer reviewed report from the Royal Statistical Society on statistical issues in investigation of suspected medical misconduct.

Since the conviction a British neonatal nurse, Lucy Letby, on multiple charges of murder and attempted murder in August 2023, Gill has publicly expressed doubt over her guilt.

Honours Gill was elected a Member of the International Statistical Institute in 1984, He was appointed a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. From 2007 to 2011, he served as President of the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research. Gill was selected as the 2010–2011 Distinguished Lorentz Fellow by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Selected publications