Simon Tavaré has for many years worked on statistical problems arising in molecular biology, human genetics, population genetics, molecular evolution bioinformatics and computational biology. Among his methodological interests is stochastic computation, including ABC, the topic of his lecture.

He is a Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Professor of Cancer Research (Bioinformatics) in the Oncology Department at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Senior Group Leader in the new Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute. His group there focuses mainly on cancer genomics and evolutionary approaches to cancer. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Simon is also a Research Professor, and George and Louise Kawamoto Chair in Biological Sciences, at the University of Southern California. He is PI of the NIH Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at USC, which is developing computational and experimental approaches for understanding how genotype relates to phenotype.