IMS member Peter Diggle has received the UK Royal Statistical Society’s prestigious Guy Medal in Gold for 2024. The Guy Medal in Gold is a lifetime achievement award, given to a fellow of the RSS who is judged to have merited distinction by innovative contributions to the theory or application of statistics.

Peter Diggle is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at CHICAS (the Centre for Health Informatics, Computing, and Statistics) in Lancaster University’s Faculty of Health and Medicine. Professor Diggle was selected to receive the Guy Medal in Gold for his many contributions to the discipline of statistics, and in particular the use of statistics in solving challenging problems in biomedical, health and environmental sciences. He has contributed groundbreaking methodological work in spatial and longitudinal statistics, as well as sustained impactful applied work over a period covering nearly fifty years.

Professor Diggle was President of the Royal Statistical Society from 2014–16, as well as fulfilling other roles at the society. He has mentored more than 50 doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. He was awarded the RSS Guy Medal in Silver in 1997 and is a former editor of the society’s journal, JRSS Series B. In 2001 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was founding co-editor of the journal Biostatistics between 1999 and 2009, and is a Trustee for Biometrika. He has served the UK Medical Research Council as a member of their Population and Systems Medicine Research Board, Training and Careers Group and Population Health Group, and the Wellcome Trust as a member of their Advisory Group in Sustaining Health.

Guy Medals are named after William Augustus Guy, a British medical statistician. The Bronze and Silver medals are awarded annually and the Gold medal is awarded every two years. This year’s Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to Jonathan Tawn. With a stellar publication career, Jonathan Tawn has made numerous pioneering contributions to the statistics of extremes and their profound influence on science and society. The recipient of the 2024 Guy Medal in Bronze is Chris Oates. Chris has made outstanding highly significant contributions to computational statistics. His research has led to substantial improvements in the efficiencies of Bayesian Monte Carlo methods, which has impacted methodological and applied work in statistics and machine learning.