Over the coming months we will be featuring previews of the 2019 special invited speakers who will be giving their lectures at three IMS meetings this year: the INFORMS/APS meeting in Brisbane, Australia, July 2–4; the 41st Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications 2019 (SPA 2019), July 8–12 in Evanston, Illinois, USA; and the 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings, JSM, July 27–August 1, in Denver, Colorado, USA.

Charles Bordenave will be giving a Medallion Lecture at the INFORMS/APS meeting. The SPA meeting will feature two Medallion lectures, from Krzysztof Burdzy [see this link] and Etienne Pardoux, as well as the Schramm Lecture from Stanislav Smirnov. At the JSM, the Wald lecturer will be Trevor Hastie; the Rietz lecture will be Yoav Benjamini, and the remaining four Medallion lectures will be given by David Dunson [see this link], Elizaveta (Liza) Levina, Hao Helen Zhang and Yee Whye Teh.

So, to give you a taste of their lectures, two of the 2019 special invited speakers outline their subjects in the next posts. We’ll bring you more preview articles in the next few issues.