Fellows of the Royal Society

The UK’s Royal Society has elected 60 new Fellows and Foreign Members, among whom are Geoffrey Grimmett, Martin Hairer and H. Vincent Poor.

Geoffrey Grimmett, an IMS Fellow and Council member, is Professor of Mathematical Statistics, Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and Master of Downing College, Cambridge. The Royal Society website says, “At a time of flowering of probabilistic methods in all branches of mathematics, Geoffrey Grimmett is one of the broadest probabilists of his generation, and unquestionably a leading figure in the subject on the world scene. He is particularly recognised for his achievements in the rigorous theory of disordered physical systems. Especially influential is his work on and around percolation theory, the contact model for stochastic spatial epidemics, and the random-cluster model, a class that includes the Ising/Potts models of ferromagnetism. His monograph on percolation is a standard work in a core area of probability, and is widely cited. His breadth within probability is emphasized by his important contributions to probabilistic combinatorics and probabilistic number theory.”

Martin Hairer is Regius Professor of Mathematics, Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick. His research interests are stochastic PDEs, stochastic analysis, functional analysis, and homogenization theory. According to the Royal Society website, he“is one of the world’s foremost leaders in the field of stochastic partial differential equations in particular, and in stochastic analysis and stochastic dynamics in general. By bringing new ideas to the subject he made fundamental advances in many important directions such as the study of variants of Hormander’s theorem, systematization of the construction of Lyapunov functions for stochastic systems, development of a general theory of ergodicity for non-Markovian systems, multiscale analysis techniques, theory of homogenization, theory of path sampling and, most recently, theory of rough paths and the newly introduced theory of regularity structures.”

H. Vincent Poor of Princeton University was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. At Princeton, Vince is Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Michael Henry Strater University Professor. His research interests are in the areas of statistical signal processing, stochastic analysis and information theory, and their applications in wireless networks and related fields. Among his publications in these areas is the recent book Mechanisms and Games for Dynamic Spectrum Allocation (Cambridge University Press, 2014). An IMS Fellow since 2001 and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Vince is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Academy of Engineering of the UK.

Researchers receive IJERPH Best Paper Award 2014

What are the human health implications of climate change? There is by now a well established body of evidence about the direct effects of increasing temperature, for example, heat stroke. But is that the full story? It is also possible that air pollution patterns may change as a result of the changing climate, especially ozone, whose production is stimulated by hot weather. In work started at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) and later completed with colleagues at North Carolina State University, Howard Chang studied the effect of simultaneous changes in temperature and ozone, using simulations from climate models. Rather than run the model multiple times under different scenarios (a very time-consuming process), Chang and his colleagues devised a statistical approach which saves computation time and also allows them to estimate the uncertainty in their projections. As a result, they find significant increases in projected mortality in the southeastern USA during the period 2041–2050, compared with levels in 2000.

The resulting paper, written by Chang, Jingwen Zhou, North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Montserrat Fuentes, NCSU, was awarded the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) Best Paper Award 2014. Their paper, “Impact of Climate Change on Ambient Ozone Level and Mortality in Southeastern United States” received the third prize in the “Articles” category.

Each year the IJERPH Best Paper Award recognizes outstanding papers in the area of environmental health sciences and public health that meet the aims, scope and high standards of the IJERPH journal. Read the article here and more information about the award here.