The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) has awarded its 2018 Presidents Award to RSS fellow, Richard Samworth.
The award is presented every year to a young member of one of COPSS's societies, recognising outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. This year’s award citation recognised Richard for his ‘fundamental contributions to nonparametric inference' and for 'many substantial contributions to the profession, including editorial service and extensive service to statistical societies; and for the training and mentoring of junior researchers.’
Richard is professor of statistics and director of the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, having previously obtained his PhD in Statistics there in 2004. He is a faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and holds a fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Richard has served on editorial boards of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, Statistical Science, Statistica Sinica, and SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science (SIMODS). He will begin a term as co-editor of the Annals of Statistics (with Ming Yuan) from January 1, 2019.
As well as the 2018 COPSS Presidents’ Award, Richard has been the recipient of a number of other prestigious honours, he was awarded with the Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze in 2012, having received its Research Prize just four years earlier. He won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2014 and the Adams Prize in 2017. In 2014 he became a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and gave an IMS Medallion lecture in 2018 at its annual meeting in Vilnius.
‘This is a fine achievement by Richard Samworth, who has brilliantly shown how rigorous statistical methodology can be applied to the problems facing modern data science,’ says RSS President David Spiegelhalter. ‘The RSS, and the whole statistics community, should be very proud of him.’
An interview Richard regarding his recent award has been published in the American Statistical Association's Amstat News.