Each year, we give
medals, prizes and honorary fellowships to people who have made outstanding contributions in their field. The following people have worked tirelessly to progress the disciplines of statistics and data science. Join us for the presentation of these awards at this year's
RSS Annual Conference in Brighton this September.
Dr Andrew Garrett, RSS President and chair of the Honours Committee, said: “I'm pleased to say that this year marks the highest number of nominations we've received in five years. Our 2024 honours recipients exemplify the significant impact individuals can have on both their field and societal understanding. On behalf of the entire RSS community, I extend my heartfelt congratulations to all of them.”
We’ll be launching the call-out for our 2025 honours in late-May 2024, and our newly established search committee will also be actively looking for potential nominees. We encourage all RSS fellows to nominate so we can ensure we recognise and represent excellence across the statistics community in all its diversity.
Medals and prizes
David Borchers – Barnett Award: David has been instrumental in developing new and accessible methodologies in wildlife monitoring and conservation, including mark-recapture distance sampling and unifying many observation models for detecting and counting animals.
Esta Clark – West Medal: Esta has delivered outstanding work in developing and communicating important public statistics under immense public scrutiny, ensuring that statistics from the Scottish Census could be used for the public good with confidence.
Shirley Coleman – Greenfield Medal: Shirley has played a fundamental role in delivering impactful statistical solutions to a range of industrial sectors, including to the National Grid and for SMEs across the marine, utilities, automotive, social housing and service sectors.
Peter Diggle – Guy Medal in Gold: Peter has contributed both groundbreaking methodological work in spatial and longitudinal statistics as well as impactful applied work over a sustained period of close to fifty years.
Daniel García Rasines – David Cox Research Prize: Daniel has pioneered work on selective inference. In particular, he created a novel proposal for information splitting that has had significant impacts on the study of post-selection inference.
Rachel Hilliam and John MacInnes – Chambers Medal (joint): Rachel and John have overseen substantial changes within RSS professional affairs. Not least, they both played a vital role in the creation of the Alliance for Data Science Professionals.
Vahé Nafilyan – Wood Medal: Vahé has made excellent contributions to social statistics. His outstanding work in developing the use of large-scale linked data has improved understanding of the link between health and social factors, with important practical advantages and widespread impact.
Chris Oates – Guy Medal in Bronze: Chris has made highly significant contributions to computational statistics. His research has led to substantial improvements in the efficiencies of Bayesian Monte Carlo methods, which has impacted methodological and applied work in statistics and machine learning.
Mahesh (Max) Parmar – Bradford Hill Medal: Max has collaborated with clinicians to design, conduct and analyse a wide range of high quality and clinically influential cancer trials, which have changed practice through incorporation in multiple clinical guidelines worldwide.
Fiona Steele – Howard Medal: Fiona has made groundbreaking contributions to the field of social statistics, in particular the development of methods for the analysis of panel data, the use and extension of event history models, multilevel and multistate models as well competing risk and survival models within the longitudinal framework.
Jonathan Tawn – Guy Medal in Silver: With a stellar publication career, Jonathan has made numerous pioneering contributions to the statistics of extremes and their profound influence on science and society. He has also shown an exceptional commitment to the training of early-career researchers.
Read the full citations for each of our recipients.