The UK’s Royal Statistical Society (RSS) has announced the recipients of its honours for 2016. Three IMS Fellows were selected to receive the Guy Medals in Gold and Silver, and the Barnett Award.

The Guy Medal in Gold is awarded to Sir Adrian Smith for sustained excellence in the development of Bayesian statistical methodology and its application. Professor Sir Adrian Smith, FRS, is vice-chancellor of the University of London; he was formerly the Queen Mary University principal and worked at the UK Government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. His work in statistics has been critical to the transformation of Bayesian thinking from philosophical debate to practical methodology, including path-breaking work on the now ubiquitous use of Monte Carlo methods for conducting inference in realistically complex models. He played an instrumental role in broadening the focus of the RSS from the statistical community to the impact that the discipline of statistics has on modern society, an approach that he continued within the Civil Service on leaving academia.

The Guy Medal in Silver for 2016 is awarded to Nancy Reid for her path-breaking paper “Parameter Orthogonality and Approximate Conditional Inference,” written jointly with Sir David Cox, which is one of the most highly cited and influential papers in RSS journals within the last 30 years. The award also recognises Nancy’s many other important contributions to statistical theory and methodology, including composite likelihood methods, design of experiments, survival analysis and saddle point approximations; and her outstanding leadership of, and service to, the statistical research community.

Finally, the Barnett Award Lecture, recognising excellence in environmental statistics, was made to Noel Cressie. In addition to advancing fundamental methodology, his extensive publication list includes applications of statistical methods to address a diverse array of issues in the environmental sciences. Noel’s many publications include a wide range of environmental-science applications, in addition to fundamental methodology. His authoritative book Statistics for Spatial Data, published in 1991, is very widely cited by researchers in environmental science and in many other disciplines beyond statistics.