Simon Gates is Professor of Biostatistics and Clinical Trials at the Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit (CRCTU), University of Birmingham.  He started working in clinical trials in 1997, at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford, before moving to the University of Warwick in 2005 to take up a post at the newly-established Warwick Clinical Trials Unit. At Warwick CTU he worked in a variety of clinical fields, notably emergency medicine and prehospital care, and was a member of the team that won the “Trial of the Year” Award from the Society for Clinical Trials in 2015, for the PARAMEDIC trial of mechanical chest compression for out of hospital cardiac arrest.  He subsequently moved to the University of Birmingham in 2018, and is now the statistical and methodological lead for paediatric cancer trials at CRCTU.  His main interests are in Bayesian statistics, adaptive trial designs, and improving the methods and efficiency of trials.