We can now announce who has received Royal Statistical Society honours this year.
The 2018 recipients, are as follows:
Guy Medal in Silver: Peter Bühlmann
Guy Medal in Bronze: Peng Ding
Bradford Hill Medal: Nicky Best
Greenfield Industrial Medal: Idris Eckley
West Medal: Jill Leyland
Barnett Award: Peter Diggle
Research Prize: Emanuele Giorgi
Howard Medal: Colin Aitken
Here are citations for all the recipients:
The Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to Peter Bühlmann for his highly–cited paper entitled ‘Stability Selection’, joint with Nicolai Meinshausen, which was read to the Society and published in 2010, and proposes a very general method for improving the performance of an arbitrary variable selection algorithm. Also for his 2016 discussion paper ‘Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals’, joint with Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen, which introduced a new notion of invariance into the causal inference literature and showed how this can be exploited, for instance to obtain confidence intervals for causal effects.
The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to Peng Ding for his methodological and theoretical contributions to casual inference, specifically for his three papers in JRSS B: Ding and Lu (2017), Jiang, Ding and Geng (2016) and Ding, Feller and Miratrix (2016). Despite only having been awarded his PhD in 2015, his work in these three papers provides a ground-breaking theoretical foundation for conducting objective causal inference.
The Bradford Hill Medal is awarded to Nicky Best for her exquisite expositions of Bayesian methods through BUGS software, workshops, lectures, prior elicitations, textbooks and peer-review publications; and for substantive applications ranging from clinical trials and cost-effectiveness to epidemiology and, most recently, the optimization of pharmaceutical research programmes.
The Greenfield Industrial Medal is awarded to Idris Eckley for his statistical contributions to substantive, industrial research problems. His high-quality research on change points and non-stationary time series has made substantial impact on a range of multinational companies. He has also led an exceptional culture change in the scale and diversity of industrially collaborative research in statistical doctoral training. In particular, he has pioneered a model of co-created fundamental research in partnership with industry within the STOR-i doctoral training centre, which has had contributions, including co-funded PhD projects, from over 80 different industrial partners since its inception in 2010.
The West Medal for outstanding contributions to the development and use of official or social statistics is awarded to Jill Leyland. Jill has wide experience of using official statistics in her work as a business economist and statistician and has provided extensive support to the Royal Statistical Society over many years as it developed its strategy on official statistics, most notably in connection with proposed new statistical legislation and governance arrangements. More recently Jill has focused on developing proposals for a new household price index and has led the Society's contribution to the high profile official reviews into the retail and consumer price indices. Jill also continues to represent business and economic statistics users' views on the future development of official statistics in these areas.
The Barnett Award is awarded to Peter Diggle for his outstanding and sustained contribution within the field of environmental statistics, particularly in relation to the area of environmental health sciences. He is one of the most distinguished and influential statisticians working in the area of developing and fitting statistical models to spatial and spatio-temporal data applied to the environmental sciences. He has published extensively in both the statistical and environmental sciences literatures and written several substantial books establishing the statistical methods as core tools within the environmental sciences.
The Royal Statistical Society Research Prize is awarded to Emanuele Giorgi for his outstanding published contribution at the interface of statistics and epidemiology, spanning the development of spatial statistical methods, their application to a range of substantive problems in global population health research and their implementation in open-source software. Giorgi has published 17 journal articles including a joint paper in Environmetrics (2017) with Daniela Schluter and Peter Diggle on examining bivariate geostatistical modelling of the relationship between Loa loa prevalence and intensity of infection.
The Howard Medal is awarded to Colin Aitken, whose work is an outstanding example of how a statistician can integrate with those in a substantive area. He has specialised in statistical reasoning in the law and forensic science and has engaged extensively with practitioners in these areas, developing software for their use and publishing in that applied literature. He has authored a highly regarded and wide-ranging book that brings together a range of techniques (statistics and the evaluation of evidence for forensic scientists) as well as a number of guides for practitioners. He set up the Statistics and the Law section section at the Royal Statistical Society. He has collaborated extensively with practitioners covering areas such as detecting cocaine in banknotes and the use of Bayesian belief networks in the analysis of criminal evidence, in which area he has co-authored a recent book.
More about the RSS Honours can be found at www.rss.org.uk/honours.
Photo shows RSS President David Spiegelhalter presenting the Guy Medal in Bronze to last year's winner, Yingying Fan.