In 2019, Sylvia was awarded Commander of the Most Excellent Order British Empire (CBE). Sylvia has also been awarded the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis Sylvia has worked extensively in many areas of biostatistics research and made important contributions to the statistical modelling of complex biomedical data, in particular from a Bayesian perspective.

Her work has contributed to progress in epidemiological understanding and has covered spatial modelling and disease mapping, measurement error problems, mixture and clustering models as well as integrative analysis of observational data from different sources. She is particularly interested in developing new analytical strategies for integrative and translational genomics, including statistical methodology for risk stratification, discovering disease subtypes, and large scale hierarchical analysis of high dimensional biomedical and multi-omics data.