RSSeNEWS to be determined...

The Society's AGM and annual presentation of awards took place on Wednesday 24 June. When the formalities of the AGM had been completed, the president, David Hand, introduced the early evening session which comprised the presentation of statistical honours and then the awards for statistical excellence in journalism.

Society honours

The senior medal to be presented this year was the Guy medal in silver. This went to Sylvia Richardson "for her influential work in Bayesian statistics, especially her paper entitled `On Bayesian analysis of mixtures with an unknown number of components', jointly authored with Peter Green, and read to the Society in 1997."  Her contributions to Bayesian methodology were typified by her principled and thorough engagement with structured datasets arising in the biomedical sciences, including her three recent papers in Series A and C as well as her many other high quality publications. In addition she had made many other important service contributions to both the discipline and the Society.

The president then presented the Guy medal in bronze, the recipient this year being Chris Holmes "for his work in developing innovative statistical methods of analysis for many application-driven problems, and for advocating the use of statistical advances in fields of application." His work included two jointly-authored papers published in Series B (with Mallick and Adams respectively) and recent innovative Bayesian model-based hierarchical clustering methods for gene-expression data, which have been applied to cell lines of the Anopholes mosquito - a major vector of malaria. Chris had also conducted groundbreaking work on methodology for inhomogenous random fields, developed new methods for modelling geological thermal histories and introduced Bayesian mixture models into geochronology.

The next award to be presented was the Bradford Hill medal for medical statistics. This was awarded to Stephen Senn. In presenting the medal, the president explained that over the last two decades few of the more important techniques and issues in pharmaceutical statistics had managed to hide from the light shed by Stephen Senn's insight. The combination of his wide-ranging statistical knowledge and his deep understanding of the clinical areas where he applied it had led to him challenging conventional wisdom and to consequent changes in his colleagues' practices in drug development and trial methodology.  While his many papers and three acclaimed books contained the definitive version of his work, his forceful and witty exposition at countless conferences had been equally influential.

An honorary fellowship was then awarded to Paul Wiles. The president explained that honorary fellowship was given to eminent individuals who were not members of the statistical profession in recognition of their contribution in fields related to statistics and that Paul was one such individual, being not only chief scientific advisor at the Home Office but also the chief government social researcher and head of the Government Social Research Service. During his time at the Home Office, Paul had worked tirelessly to enhance the methodological standards of evaluations. He had opened up lines of statistical communication into the Home Office and had successfully made the case for statisticians within the Home Office to workdirectly with him and his chief statistician.

The final statistical honour to be presented was the Research prize which the Society awards for an outstanding original contribution to statistical theory or application shown in work published in the open literature.   This year the prize was awarded to Andrew Golightly "for his work at the interface between computationally intensive statistical methods and computational biology". Before completing his PhD in 2006, Andrew had already published one paper in a leading international journal for statistical methods relating to the biological sciences. Since then he had continued to publish original methodological work on inference for non-linear multivariate diffusion processes and applied work in stochastic models for biochemical networks.

Four of the people the Society had recognised this year were unable to attend.  These were Sir Kenneth Calman, Clive Fairweather and Sir Michael Rawlins, who were due to receive honorary fellowships, and Christopher Skinner, the winner of the West medal. The president expressed the hope that they might be able to receive their awards at the forthcoming conference in Edinburgh.

Journalism awards

The winner of the print and online award was Alice Tarleton, of Channel 4 Online. Alice was an online reporter covering news and politics for Channel 4 News.

A former 'student journalist of the year', she specialised in a job many would love - scrutinising dubious political claims for Channel 4's online news analysis service, FactCheck. This particular award was made for Alice's FactCheck report 'how many CCTV cameras?'

The runner-up in this category was Nic Fleming, a freelance journalist.

Nic had written for a range of authoritative publications that included New Scientist, the Economist, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday and the Climber magazine. In 14 years he had covered international events, politics, social trends, the environment, show business, science, medicine and much more. His award was given for his piece in the Economist, 'Mobile madness'.

The winner of the  Broadcast award was the BBC News home editor, Mark Easton. Mark's role was to provide expert analysis and broad perspective on the issues and stories affecting modern Britain, chronicling the impact of rapid demographic, technological, economic and global change.

The judges had singled out for the award his reports on crime figures and the longer series for BBC Radio 4 'Crime of our lives' that charted Britain's experience of crime since WW2.

The final award to be presented went  to Helen Joyce, education editor of the Economist. As well as education, Helen covered some statistical, social and health-related issues, stories relating to children and family life, and British science. With a BA in maths and a PhD in geometric measure theory she had all the intellectual 'chops' needed. Furthermore, Helen was founding editor of our quarterly magazine, Significance.

Our judges had been particularly impressed by her piece in the Economist, 'Charts: worth a thousand words', and for this Helen was presented with a formal commendation.