Julian Peto is an English

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 statistician

Statistician

A statistician is someone who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. The core of that work is to measure, interpret, and describe the world and human activity patterns within it...

 and cancer epidemiologist. He is Cancer Research UK

Cancer Research UK

Cancer Research UK is a cancer research and awareness charity in the United Kingdom, formed on 4 February 2002 by the merger of The Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. Its aim is to reduce the number of deaths from cancer. As the world's largest independent cancer...

 Chair of Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Institute of Cancer Research

Institute of Cancer Research

The Institute of Cancer Research is a cancer research institute located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. The ICR was founded in 1909 as a research department of the Royal Marsden Hospital and joined the University of London in 2003...

. Before he took up his current post in 1983 he worked as a research scientist under Sir Richard Doll

Richard Doll

Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll CH OBE FRS was a British physiologist who became the foremost epidemiologist of the 20th century, turning the subject into a rigorous science. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems...

 at the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

.

His brother Richard Peto

Richard Peto

Sir Richard Peto FRS is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford.He attended Taunton's School in Southampton and subsequently studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University....

, with whom he has published work in mathematical statistics

Mathematical statistics

Mathematical statistics is the study of statistics from a mathematical standpoint, using probability theory as well as other branches of mathematics such as linear algebra and analysis...

 (see the logrank test

Logrank test

In statistics, the logrank test is a hypothesis test to compare the survival distributions of two samples. It is a nonparametric test and appropriate to use when the data are right skewed and censored...

), is also a distinguished epidemiologist.