Tim Cole has been professor of medical statistics at UCL Institute of Child Health since 1999. He originally studied engineering at Cambridge and statistics at Oxford, and has been employed by the Medical Research Council for his career from 1970 to 2019, working first at the MRC Pneumoconiosis Research Unit in South Wales and then from 1975 at the MRC Dunn Nutrition Unit in Cambridge. From 1999 to 2019 he was an external scientific staff member with the MRC, and since then professional research associate with UCL. His research interests cover many aspects of child growth assessment, including growth chart construction (the LMS method), growth curve analysis (the SITAR method), factors relating early growth to later outcome, the IOTF child obesity cut-offs (cited over 10,000 times to date), body size scaling and forensic age assessment. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed papers and his h-index stands at 110. In 2006/07 he was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and also Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2016 he was awarded the Rank Prize for Nutrition, and also the Royal Statistical Society's Bradford Hill Medal. In 2019 he was given the Tanner Memorial Medal of the Society for the Study of Human Biology.

He has also been heavily involved in peer review, both as a statistical and subject reviewer, acting as referee for over 50 journals and a statistical reviewer (latterly statistics editor) for the BMJ since 1991. He has also been a regular member of the BMJ primary care hanging committee and more recently the BMJ Manuscript Meeting. He is in charge of statistical review for the Archives of Disease in Childhood.