The Mardia Prize
The Mardia Prize was founded by RSS fellow Kanti Mardia to encourage cutting-edge interdisciplinary work by bringing together statistics with other science communities through workshops in emerging interdisciplinary areas. The annual prize of £3,000-4,000 is made available to support workshops that bring statisticians together with other scientific communities and to maintain a sustained focus.
Information for applicants
The Society welcomes proposals for workshops to be run over a two-year period, starting during 2027. Funding of £3,000–£4,000 per year will be made available to support these workshops. The events/workshops should be designed to bring statisticians together with other scientific communities and to maintain a sustained focus. We envisage that the funding would be used to support one workshop per year, but more extensive workshop plans that use other funding as leverage will also be considered.
Applications are especially welcomed from researchers in the early stages of their career, although applications or involvement from those with more experience and wider contacts are also welcome.
Applicants should consider carefully how to foster genuine interaction between communities, for example by scheduling interactive sessions within the workshops, or by setting up online networks to encourage ongoing dialogue. There should be some record of the proceedings of the programmes, which could be short online papers rather than just presenters’ slides. At the end of the work, the organisers should provide a brief report to the Society, demonstrating the outcomes of the initiative.
Download the application form
2026 recipient: Dr Purvasha Chakravarti
The winning prize came from Dr Purvasha Chakravarti and Prof. François-Xavier Briol from the Department of Statistical Science at UCL. The workshops will bring together statisticians and physicists to discuss key challenges and share knowledge across disciplines. The series will run as two one-day workshops, the first focusing on Statistics meets Theoretical and Particle Physics and the second on Statistics meets Astrophysics and Cosmology.
2025 recipient: Dr Eleni Elia
The winning prize came from Dr Eleni Elia, Senior Lecturer in Statistics and Mathematics at Oxford Brooks University. The workshop will focus on migration and refugee studies which will consist of five workshops that will be spread over two years. The workshop series will be partnered with the charity Refugee Education and will bring together researchers from the humanities
2024 recipient: Dr Emanuele Giorgi
The winning proposal came from Dr Emanuele Giorgi from Lancaster University. Emanuele plans to hold a series of workshops focused on the application of geostatistical methods to inform policy decisions on the control and elimination neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).
Winner will be announced in Spring 2027.