George Davey Smith is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Bristol, Honorary Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow and Visiting Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is Scientific Director of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and Director of the Medical Research Council's Integrative Epidemiology Unit. His major research interests relate to the use of genetic epidemiology for informing understanding of the causal influence of environmentally modifiable risk factors and how social inequalities in health are generated by exposures acting over the entire lifecourse. Professor Smith has also worked on HIV/AIDS prevention in Nicaragua and India and on issues around the history of epidemiology, meta-analysis, lay epidemiology and epidemiological methodology. He is co-editor of the International Journal of Epidemiology.