He’s a stat man!

Wednesday, 9 March 2022 18:32

A Lancaster University statistician whose work is used, amongst other things, in testing space suits, is to receive a prestigious honour.

Professor Paul Fearnhead will receive a ‘Guy Medal in Silver’ from the Royal Statistical Society for his outstanding contributions to statistics.

The Guy medals are named after the British medical statistician, William Augustus Guy, and the Silver and Bronze medals are awarded annually.

The Royal Statistical Society has announced Professor Fearnhead will be awarded the Medal for his contributions in areas of statistics known as ‘Bayesian computational statistics’, ‘changepoint methods’, population genetics and inference for ‘continuous-time stochastic processes’. He has read four landmark papers to the Society that have established exciting avenues of research in computational statistics, and his work has had impact across a range of applications including informing health policy in New Zealand, monitoring critical digital infrastructure and is used in procedures to test space suits.

Professor Fearnhead will join recipients of other honours from the Royal Statistical Society at a ceremony during the society’s annual conference in September where he will receive his award.

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.”

Professor Alexander Belton, Head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Lancaster University, said: “I am delighted that Professor Fearnhead's many outstanding contributions to statistics have been recognised with the award of this prestigious medal. His work continues to shape the direction of research in many contemporary areas of the discipline, and enables researchers in numerous other fields to undertake sophisticated data analyses using computationally efficient approaches."

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