The UK’s Royal Statistical Society awards Guy Medals, named after William Augustus Guy, the British medical statistician. The Bronze and Silver medals are awarded annually and the Gold medal is awarded every two years. This year’s RSS Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to IMS President-Elect Richard Samworth. Richard holds the Professorship of Statistical Science and is Director of the Statistical Laboratory, a sub-department of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Teaching Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge.

His citation reads: “Richard Samworth has made outstanding contributions to the development of methodology and theory for shape-constrained inference random ensemble classification, data-perturbation techniques, and changepoint estimation. His discussion paper ‘Maximum likelihood estimation of a multi-dimensional log-concave density’ became a landmark providing methodology, elegant theory and efficient computation in shape constrained inference.”

Richard’s research interests include shape-constrained estimation problems; data perturbation methods (e.g. subsampling, bootstrap sampling, random projections, knockoffs); missing and corrupted data; subgroup analysis; nonparametric classification, clustering and semi-supervised learning problems; unconditional and conditional independence testing; estimation of entropy and other functionals; high-dimensional statistical inference, including changepoint problems and variable selection; and applications, including public health, genetics, archaeology and oceanography.