Guy Medals
Guy Medals are named after William Augustus Guy, the British medical statistician. The Bronze and Silver medals are awarded annually and the Gold medal is awarded every two years.
Guy Medal in Gold
The Guy Medal in Gold is a ‘lifetime achievement’ award given to a fellow of the Society judged to have merited distinction by innovative contributions to the theory or application of statistics.
2026 recipient: Peter McCullagh
Peter has a long list of pivotal contributions to statistical theory, which is both broad in range and exceptional in depth, including developing group-theoretical foundations and tensor methods for statistical modelling.
2024 recipient: Peter Diggle
Peter has contributed both groundbreaking methodological work in spatial and longitudinal statistics as well as impactful applied work over a sustained period of close to fifty years.
Guy Medal in Silver
The Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to a fellow of the Society in respect of a paper or papers of special merit communicated to the Society at its discussion meetings. Other contributions to statistics may also be considered.
2026 recipient: Christl Donnelly
Christl has made outstanding contributions to the development and application of statistical and biomathematical methods to analyse patterns of infectious diseases. Her extensive publication list includes five papers in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, one of which was presented at an RSS special topic meeting on COVID-19 transmission.
2025 recipient: Richard Samworth
Richard has made outstanding contributions to the development of methodology and theory for shape-constrained inference random ensemble classification, data-perturbation techniques, and changepoint estimation. His discussion paper `Maximum likelihood estimation of a multi-dimensional log-concave density' became a landmark providing methodology, elegant theory and efficient computation in shape constrained inference.
The Guy Medal in Silver, the Bradford Hill Medal and the Howard Medal are intended for achievements of similar standards, subject to the different descriptions and requirements of the awards. The Honours Committee has the freedom to consider nominees for one of these medals for either of the other two if they satisfy the necessary specific criteria.
Guy Medal in Bronze
The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to a fellow of the Society in respect of excellent work presented to any conference or meeting run by the Society or published in any of the Society’s journals.
2026 recipient: Maria Skoularidou
Maria’s expertise in high dimensional statistics has an exceptional impact in areas, including the estimation of discrete and tabular data. Her contributions are both methodological (developing new methods) and applied, with work published in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B.
2025 recipient: Jenny Wadsworth
Jenny's innovative modelling and practical methodology has helped improve the understanding of rare events, which has improved understanding of key societal issues such as climate change. She has made contributions to the analysis of multivariate and spatial extremes.
Candidates nominated for the Guy Medal in Bronze and the Wood Medal may be considered for the other medal, provided they satisfy the necessary specific criteria.