Every year we award medals and prizes to people who have made outstanding contributions to the development of statistics. We are thrilled to announce the recipients of this year’s honours, who will be presented with their awards at a ceremony during our annual conference in Aberdeen this September.
The 2022 winners are:
- Guy Medal in Gold – Nancy Reid
- Guy Medal in Silver – Paul Fearnhead
- Guy Medal in Bronze – Rajen Shah
- The David Cox Research Prize – Dominik Rothenhäusler
- Barnett Award – Ruth King
Professor Sylvia Richardson, RSS President and Chair of the Honours Committee, said: ‘This year’s honours recipients are brilliant examples of the contributions that individual statisticians can make both to the discipline and society more generally. On behalf of the Honours Committee, I am delighted to give my warmest congratulations to them all.’
Guy Medal in Gold – Nancy Reid
The Guy Medal in Gold is awarded to Nancy Reid for her pioneering work on higher-order approximate inference which provides a foundational basis for optimal information extraction from data, and has wide-ranging impact on the practice of data analysis. She has made numerous deep mathematical and methodological contributions to the theory of likelihood inference, in particular on the tangent exponential model and directional inference. She is known for her extensive service to the worldwide statistical community, and as a role model for future generations of statisticians.
Guy Medal in Silver – Paul Fearnhead
The Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to Paul Fearnhead for his numerous outstanding contributions to statistics, particularly in Bayesian computational statistics, changepoint methods, population genetics and inference for continuous-time stochastic processes. He has read four papers to the Society, including 'Constructing summary statistics for approximate Bayesian computation: semi-automatic approximate Bayesian computation' (with D Prangle) published in 2012 and `Quasi-stationary Monte Carlo and the ScaLE algorithm' (with M Pollock, AM Johansen and GO Roberts) published in 2020. These landmark papers have established exciting avenues of new research in computational statistics, with impact across a range of application domains.
Guy Medal in Bronze – Rajen Shah
The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to Rajen Shah for his pioneering research on large-scale statistical learning, including important contributions to goodness-of-fit testing, interaction search and conditional independence testing. His work is characterised by innovative methodological development, precise analysis and practical relevance, as evidenced in his five JRSSB papers.
David Cox Research Prize – Dominik Rothenhäusler
The David Cox Research Prize is awarded to Dominik Rothenhäusler for his ground-breaking work on causality, robustness and replicability with wide-ranging implications on many practical problems. In particular, for his paper ‘Anchor regression: heterogeneous data meets causality’ which is published in JRSSB.
Barnett Award – Ruth King
The Barnett Award is awarded to Ruth King, who is internationally known for her work in statistical ecology, and in particular bringing to prominence in this field, the use of Bayesian statistics. She has worked with different types of data – notably capture-recapture and ring-recovery – as well as others such as count data and telemetry data. In addition, she has worked with various associated models, including integrated population models, state-space and hidden Markov-type models applied to ecological data. She has authored and co-authored highly influential methodological and applied papers in Bayesian population ecology, having published more than 70 papers and co-authored two books. She has also played important roles in the National Centre for Statistical Ecology, including as deputy director. She has championed environmental and ecological statistics nationally within the RSS and also internationally within the International Biometrics Society (president and vice-president of the British and Irish region).
The Guy medals are named after the British medical statistician, William Augustus Guy. The Bronze and Silver medals are awarded annually, and the Gold Medal is awarded every two years. The Research Prize is for those near the beginning of the research career, for an outstanding published contribution to statistical theory or application. In 2021 the Prize was renamed in honour of former RSS president, Professor Sir David Cox. The Barnett Award is for contributions to environmental statisticians, established in memory of Vic Barnett.
Read more about RSS Honours.