Simon N. Wood works as a Professor of Statistics at the University of Bath and currently holds an established research fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He is author of the widely used R package mgcv for smooth statistical modelling and the book Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R, as well as a number of well-cited papers on associated statistical methods. Originally trained in physics, before a spell in theoretical ecology, he has twenty years' experience of teaching statistics at undergraduate and postgraduate level, including teaching the 'statistical computing' module of the UK Academy for PhD training in statistics, for several years.