Each year, we award honorary fellowships to outstanding individuals who are not necessarily members of the statistics professions but who have displayed exceptional commitment to furthering the role and understanding of data and statistics in society.
The lifetime award particularly recognises those whose work furthers the Society’s goals and values, like supporting public understanding and furthering interdisciplinarity in research.
This year’s awardees are:
John Burn-Murdoch for his excellent and clear exposition of various complex topics using visualisations as chief data reporter for the Financial Times, especially for his major role in media explanations of Covid.
Andrew Ng for his research in machine learning, deep learning, machine perception, computer vision, and natural language processing, having founded Google Brain.
Hannah Ritchie for her role as a communicator during the Covid pandemic, as well as for her active voice in data-based analyses of climate change and sustainability, both as deputy editor of Our World in Data and as a researcher and author.
RSS President, Dr Andrew Garrett, said, ‘All three of this year’s awardees have made substantial contributions in fields related and adjacent to statistics. Both John and Hannah enhanced the UK public’s understanding of data during the Covid pandemic and continue to do so on other important topics. Andrew’s lifelong commitment to developing and teaching statistical methods linked to computer science and AI have had global impact. I am pleased that John, Hannah, and Andrew are joining our growing and vibrant Society’.
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