Mathematician chosen for international statistics award and lecture

Honour ‘completely out of the blue’ for St John’s Fellow

An academic from St John’s College has been selected for the 2025 Institute of Mathematical Statistics Grace Wahba Award and Lecture.  

Professor Richard Samworth, who is College Lecturer in Pure Mathematics, University Professor of Statistical Science, Director of the Statistical Laboratory at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and a Fellow of St John’s, is only the fourth recipient of the award.

Professor Richard Samworth
Professor Richard Samworth.

He said: “I was really delighted to be selected as the recipient of the 2025 IMS Grace Wahba Award and Lecture – the news came completely out of the blue. The list of previous recipients is not that long but is very daunting, so I’ll definitely need to be on my game to do the lecture justice.”

The award and lecture were created by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics – an international professional and scholarly society based in the United States – to honour trailblazing statistician Grace Wahba, emerita IJ Schoenberg-Hilldale Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The previous recipients are Michael Jordan (2022), Wing-Hung Wong (2023) and Nancy Reid (2024).

Learn more about the Grace Wahba Award and Lecture

Published 20/9/2024

Back to College News