The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) Savage Award, named in honor of Leonard J. “Jimmie” Savage, is bestowed each year on two outstanding doctoral dissertations in Bayesian econometrics and statistics, one each in Theory & Methods and Applied Methodology. The winner of the Theory & Methods section for 2020 was IMS member Tommaso Rigon, Assistant Professor at University of Milano-Bicocca, for his thesis entitled Finite-dimensional nonparametric priors: Theory and applications, supervised by Antonio Lijoi and Igor Prünster. The Applied Methodology winner was Adji Bousso Dieng, Assistant Professor at Princeton University, for her thesis entitled Deep Probabilistic Graphical Modeling, supervised by David Blei.

Leonard Jimmie Savage (1917–1971) was IMS President in 1957–8, and was elected an IMS Fellow in 1950. He had been selected to give the 1972 Wald lectures at the time of his untimely death aged 53. His 1954 book The Foundations of Statistics proposed a theory of subjective and personal probability and statistics that forms one of the strands underlying Bayesian statistics and has applications to game theory. One of Savage’s indirect contributions was his discovery of the work of Louis Bachelier on stochastic models for asset prices and the mathematical theory of option pricing. Savage brought the work of Bachelier to the attention of Paul Samuelson. It was from Samuelson’s subsequent writing that random walk (and subsequently Brownian motion) became fundamental to mathematical finance. 

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Note from the Editor: This article was edited on December 3, 2021. We had not highlighted the name of Adji Bousso Dieng and had omitted her middle name and affiliation. The IMS apologizes for this mistake and any offense caused.