John Nelder held a Visiting Professorship at Imperial College London from 1972 onwards, and made many fundamental contributions to statistical practice, including experimental design, analysis of variance and computational statistics, as well as to statistical theory. He was responsible for development of the statistical software packages GenStat and GLIM, which greatly influenced current environments for statistical computing, and in statistical theory is best known for his formulation (with Robert Wedderburn) of the generalized linear model, which has established an absolutely central role in applied statistics. However, John Nelder’s contributions to statistics were extensive as well as profound, and the workshop will aim to evaluate, five years after his death, his legacy in a structured way.