Emery N. Brown elected to US National Academy of Engineering

On February 5, The National Academy of Engineering announced that IMS member Emery N. Brown, the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital and the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Brown is now one of the few people who are members of all three branches of the National Academies (Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering). Dr. Brown is recognized “for development of neural signal processing algorithms for understanding memory encoding and modeling of brain states of anesthesia.”

Also among those elected this year is Ingrid Daubechies, James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics at Duke University, “for contributions to the mathematics and applications of wavelets.” See the full list at http://www.nae.edu/Projects/MediaRoom/20095/130169/130172.aspx

Richard Samworth receives Leverhulme Prize

Philip Leverhulme Prizes recognize the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising. Among the 30 recipients of the 2014 Leverhulme Prize was Professor Richard Samworth, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge. The prize is an award of £100,000 (approx US$150,000) a year, awarded across a range of academic disciplines (in 2014 Mathematics and Statistics was one of the six chosen areas).

Richard’s Leverhulme Prize was for his “broad and influential foundational and methodological contributions to many areas of Statistics, including non-parametric maximum likelihood, classification; high-dimensional penalized regression and model selection; density estimation; and the bootstrap. His seminal contributions on nonparametric classification, one of the most important and rapidly growing areas on the interface between Statistics and Machine Learning, have had a profound impact on the development of the field. He has also demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities in his activities on behalf of many of the world’s leading statistical societies and journals, and his work in building up Statistics within the University of Cambridge.” Richard was elected an IMS Fellow last year.

David Spiegelhalter knighted

Professor David Spiegelhalter, OBE FRS, who is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, UK (and is occasionally known to the public as “Professor Risk”) received a knighthood in last year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours list “for services to Statistics”. Speaking of the award, Sir David said, “Work on statistics doesn’t usually get much attention, and so it’s a bit of a surprise to get such a great honour for doing things with numbers.”

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Although David actually was knighted last year, this news only reached us recently. If you hear about an IMS member receiving an award, don’t forget to tell us: bulletin@imstat.org. Thanks!