The UK Royal Statistical Society has announced its 2018 awards recipients. Among them are three IMS members: Peter Bühlmann (Guy Medal in Silver), Peng Ding (Guy Medal in Bronze), and Peter Diggle (Barnett Award). The other RSS awards went to: Nicky Best (Bradford Hill Medal), Idris Eckley (Greenfield Industrial Medal), Jill Leyland (West Medal), Emanuele Giorgi (Research Prize), and Colin Aitken (Howard Medal).

The Guy Medal in Silver was awarded to IMS Fellow Peter Bühlmann for his highly-cited paper entitled “Stability Selection,” joint with Nicolai Meinshausen, which was read to the Royal Statistical Society and published in 2010, and proposes a very general method for improving the performance of an arbitrary variable selection algorithm. His citation also noted his 2016 discussion paper, “Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals,” joint with Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen, which introduced a new notion of invariance into the causal inference literature and showed how this can be exploited, for instance to obtain confidence intervals for causal effects.

The Guy Medal in Bronze was awarded to Peng Ding for his methodological and theoretical contributions to casual inference, specifically for his three papers in JRSS B: Ding and Lu (2017), Jiang, Ding and Geng (2016) and Ding, Feller and Miratrix (2016). Despite having only been awarded his PhD in 2015, his work in these three papers provides a ground-breaking theoretical foundation for conducting objective causal inference.

Peter Diggle receives the Barnett Award for his outstanding and sustained contribution within the field of environmental statistics, particularly in relation to the area of environmental health sciences. He is one of the most distinguished and influential statisticians working in the area of developing and fitting statistical models to spatial and spatio-temporal data applied to the environmental sciences. He has published extensively in both the statistical and environmental sciences literatures and written several substantial books establishing the statistical methods as core tools within the environmental sciences.

More about the RSS Honours can be found at www.rss.org.uk/honours.