The UK Royal Statistical Society has awarded Professor Peter McCullagh the 2026 Guy Medal in Gold for “pivotal contributions to statistical theory both broad in range and exceptional in depth.”

Professor McCullagh, FRS, who is John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, has made wide-ranging contributions to statistical theory and methods. His book, Tensor Methods in Statistics (1987), is a pioneering exploitation of tensor methods applied to distributional problems arising in statistics. It contains substantial new results, in particular on the distribution of likelihood-based statistics widely used in applications. His book with John A. Nelder, Generalized Linear Models (first edition 1983; second edition 1989), has had a major direct impact on statistical methods used in many fields of application.

Professor McCullagh previously received the RSS Guy Medal in Bronze in 1983, and in Silver in 2005. Among his other honors are the COPSS Presidents’ Award (1990), Fellow of the UK Royal Society (1994), elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2002), IMS Medallion Lecturer (1988), IMS Neyman Lecturer (2008), and IMS Fellow (1989).