We are thrilled to announce that the 2026 Mardia Prize for interdisciplinary workshops has been awarded to Dr Purvasha Chakravarti and Professor François-Xavier Briol from the Department of Statistical Science at UCL.
Their workshop series, Statistics Meets Fundamental Physics, aims to bring together statisticians and physicists to discuss key challenges and share knowledge across disciplines. Its goal is to develop solutions tailored to physics research that are also statistically sound and rigorous.
Currently, aside from a small number of researchers in areas such as astrostatistics, these communities tend to work in isolation. Statisticians often develop new methodologies, while physicists create statistical tools for their own research without always having formal statistical expertise.
This workshop series seeks to bridge that gap by encouraging greater collaboration between the two fields. The vision is to foster research that benefits both communities—where physics problems inspire new statistical methods, and advanced statistical techniques contribute to new discoveries in physics.
The workshop series will be run as a one-day long workshop per year over the two-year period, with one focusing on ‘Statistics meets Theoretical and Particle Physics’ and the second on ‘Statistics meets Astrophysics and Cosmology’.
More information on dates and attendence will be announced in due course.