We are delighted to announce the recipients of our 2019 honours, who will be presented with their awards at a ceremony during our annual conference in Belfast this September:
• Guy Medal in Gold: Stephen Buckland
• Guy Medal in Silver: Susan Murphy
• Guy Medal in Bronze: Jonas Peters
• Barnett Award: Marian Scott
• Research Prize: Tengyao Wang
Many congratulations to all of the recipients. Citations for each 2019 award are as follows:
Guy Medal in Gold – Stephen Buckland
The Guy Medal in Gold is awarded to Stephen Buckland for his significant and sustained contributions to the development of statistical methods for ecological applications over a period of more than 40 years. He has been a pioneer in developing robust statistical methods in many areas including wildlife population assessment, biodiversity monitoring and modelling population dynamics. He is one of the most internationally recognised and distinguished statisticians in his field, whose impact has been global for survey design and associated analytical methods, transforming the power, accuracy and robustness of traditional methods, which in turn have led to the identification of declining populations and changes in biodiversity. In addition, Stephen has opened up advanced statistical methods to the user community by leading the development of freely-available software (notably DISTANCE now with over 50,000 users from 130 countries) and associated core textbooks.
Guy Medal in Silver – Susan Murphy
The Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to Susan Murphy for her methodological, computational and applied work on dynamic treatment regimens. Susan’s influential JRSSB paper in 2003 on Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimens proposed a methodology for estimating decision regimens that result in a maximal mean response, consistent with an elegantly-defined regret function and for use with experimental or observational data. Substantial follow-up work on multi-stage decision making has built on this paper, including Susan’s own work ranging from sample size determination to performance guarantees for individualized treatment rules and applications ranging from addictions to micro-randomized optimization of mobile health interventions for the Fitbit generation.
Guy Medal in Bronze – Jonas Peters
The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to Jonas Peters for important and innovative contributions to causal inference and related statistical methodology and theory. Of particular note are his two papers in JRSSB, namely 'Kernel-based tests for joint independence' (with N Pfister, P Bühlmann and B. Schölkopf), published in 2017, and 'Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals' (with P Bühlmann and N Meinshausen), which was read to the Society in 2016.
Barnett Award – Marian Scott
The Barnett Award is made to Marian Scott for her outstanding, pioneering research into the application of innovative statistical techniques to environmental issues. Internationally recognised, Marian’s impactful work delivers statistically sound evidence supporting environmental science, policy, regulation and management in areas ranging from radioactivity, water quality to air pollution. Her interdisciplinary work at the interface between statisticians, environmental scientists and policy makers has had a major influence on a range of environmental agencies and organisations. Marian was awarded an OBE for services to science in 2009.
Research Prize – Tengyao Wang
The Research Prize is awarded to Tengyao Wang for his outstanding and diverse contributions to statistical methodology and theory. Amongst other research, he has given new understanding about computational and statistical trade-offs; developed theory for multi-dimensional shape constrained estimators; and introduced a new paradigm and method for detecting changes in high-dimensional data streams.
The RSS has now opened nominations for 2020 honours - read about them on our Honours page.