Prof. Basil Jarvis has held various academic and senior industrial research positions throughout his career as a food microbiologist. His work has taken him to many countries outside the UK including the USA, Scandinavia and South Africa. He has published widely on food quality and safety, including inhibition of microbes in food systems, microbial toxins in foods, rapid microbiological methods, and statistical aspects of food microbiology. For almost 40 years he has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and for 20 years was an Honorary Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Surrey, where he established a WHO-sponsored graduate course in Food Microbiology for medical and veterinary practitioners. He has served on numerous official advisory groups, including the statistics group of the AOAC Presidential Taskforce on 'Best Practices in Microbiological Methods'. He is also a member of the ISO working group on Microbiological Statistics. He is a Past President and Honorary Member of the Society for Applied Microbiology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a Fellow of the Institute for Food Science and Technology. Although now retired, he retains his interests in teaching students and considers statistics to be a relaxing hobby, especially when accompanied by a glass of fine wine!