Departmental homepageProfessor Samworth obtained his PhD in Statistics from the University of Cambridge in 2004, and was a Research Fellow at St John's before joining the Statistical Laboratory. He was appointed as the Professor of Statistical Science in 2017. In 2025 he was an inaugural winner of the David Cox Medal for Statistics and was awarded the Royal Statistical Society’s prestigious Guy Medal in Silver. He currently holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant.
Professor Samworth has lectured several courses in statistics, and supervise courses offered by DPMMS including Part II probability and measure and Part IB statistics.
His main research interests are in nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics. Particular topics include shape-constrained estimation problems; data perturbation methods (eg subsampling, bootstrap sampling, random projections, knockoffs); nonparametric classification; unconditional and conditional independence testing; estimation of entropy and other functionals; changepoint detection and estimation; missing data; variable and subgroup selection; and applications, including public health, genetics, archaeology and oceanography.
Müller, M. M., Reeve, H. W. J., Cannings, T. I. and Samworth, R. J. (2025) Isotonic subgroup selection. J. Roy. Statist. Soc., Ser. B, 87, 132-156
Berrett, T. B. and Samworth, R. J. (2023) Optimal nonparametric testing of Missing Completely At Random, and its connections to compatibility. Ann. Statist., 51, 2170-2193.
Zhu, Z., Wang, T. and Samworth, R. J. (2022) High-dimensional principal component analysis with heterogeneous missingness. J. Roy. Statist. Soc., Ser. B, 84, 2000-2031.
Berrett, T. B., Kontoyiannis, I. and Samworth, R. J. (2021) Optimal rates for independence testing via U-statistic permutation tests. Ann. Statist., 49, 2457-2490.
