Gordon Smyth is a statistician and bioinformatician who is known for his work on statistical computing and statistical modelling. He has long-standing interests in nonlinear estimation, dispersion estimation and algorithm development. He has made influential contributions to the analysis of genomic data, especially to linear modelling and empirical Bayes methods for the analysis of gene expression experiments. Together with collaborators, he has used genomic data to make important discoveries of relevance to breast cancer, malaria and other diseases.