Nial Friel is a professor of statistics at University College Dublin. He completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow in 1999. Following post-doctoral positions at Queensland University of Technology, University of Cambridge and Athens University of Economics and Business he returned to the University of Glasgow as a lecturer and subsequently a reader in statistics. In 2007, Nial was appointed an associate professor at University College Dublin and in 2014 he was appointed full professor. He has research interests in Bayesian statistics with a focus on statistical network analysis. He is currently joint editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C.