Denise Lievesley is an Honorary Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, having been Principal of Green Templeton for five years from 2015. Before this, she was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Social Statistics at King's College London. Formerly she has been Chief Executive of the English Health and Social Care Information Centre, Director of Statistics at UNESCO, where she founded the Institute for Statistics, and Director of the UK Data Archive.

Denise served as Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society (1999 - 2001), of the International Statistical Institute (2007 - 2009) and of the International Association for Official Statistics (1995 - 1997). A Fellow of University College London (her alma mater), she has honorary doctorates from City University and the University of Essex and is a founding Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours in June 2014 for services to social science.

Her research interests relate broadly to the quality and trust in official data, and the use of data for research purposes.