2008 Society Medals & Prizes

The Guy Medal in Gold is awarded to Professor James Durbin FBA for a life-time of highly influential contributions which have given him outstanding international recognition as a leader in our field, taking particular account of his pioneering work on testing for serial correlation in regression, on estimating equations, on Brownian motion and other processes crossing curved boundaries, on goodness of fit tests with estimated parameters, and on many aspects of time series analysis especially in areas relevant to econometrics, and also his remarkable service to the wider statistical profession on the international stage.

The Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to Professor Gareth Roberts for his extensive contributions at the interface of probability and statistical inference,  recognising in particular his two papers read to the society and published in Series B, viz., Efficient construction of reversible jump MCMC, in 2003, and Exact and computationally efficient likelihood-based estimation for discretely observed diffusion processes, in 2006, as well as the seminal and highly influential paper with Adrian Smith, entitled Bayesian computation via the Gibbs sampler and related Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, published in Series B in 1993. He has established crucial results for Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques, in  work which combines a deep theoretical understanding with a keen sense of the way that such results can be used to guide and enhance practical applications.

The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to Dr Fiona Steele for a series of papers in JRSS Series A, notably those in 2007 on the effect of resources on school attainment (with A. Vignoles and A. Jenkins) and her 2003 paper on selection effects when modelling multilevel structures, and also taking into account her methodological and practical contributions to multilevel modelling, to demography and to social statistics more generally.

The Chambers Medal is awarded to Mr Peter Holmes for his outstanding service to the Society and the Institute of Statisticians over 25 years including his leadership of the education committee, extensive work in developing and delivering the Guy Lectures for Schools and other educational activities of the society and for his valued input to the reform of the professional examinations.

The Research Prize is awarded to Dr Richard Samworth for his original contributions to non-parametric statistics, including work on the bootstrap, classification and non-parametric regression.

An Honorary Fellowship is awarded to Baroness Onora O'Neill, in recognition of her significant contributions to several areas closely connected to statistics, including medical ethics, governance of official statistics, trust in official statistics, and the role of statistical evidence

Further details on RSS Medals and Prizes are available on the Awards homepage.