The RSS Barnett Award and named lecture was established in memory of the environmental statistician, Professor Vic Barnett. It is awarded annually to encourage and promote the recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of environmental statistics.

The 2023 Barnett Award was presented to Marc Genton, Al-Khawarzmi Distinguished Professor of Statistics at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. The award is for his international impact in the area of environmental statistics. He is recognized for his work in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics with applications in environmental problems, with almost 300 publications garnering 14,600 citations.

Genton received the prestigious award during the Royal Statistical Society’s annual conference, which was held in Harrogate, UK, from September 4–7, 2023 (https://rss.org.uk/training-events/conference-2023/).

Currently, Genton’s research focuses on developing high-performance computing tools for spatial statistics and expanding the capabilities of ExaGeoStat (https://github.com/ecrc/exageostat), the software developed by his Spatio-Temporal Statistics & Data Science research group and the Extreme Computing Research Center at KAUST.