Mike West

The second Akaike Memorial Lecture Award will be presented to Mike West of Duke University during the plenary session of the Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting 2018, which will take place at the Korakuen Campus of Chuo University on September 10.

The award, jointly created by the Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM) and Japan Statistical Society (JSS), aims to encourage the education of talented young researchers by recognizing those who have achieved outstanding accomplishments that contribute to the field of statistical sciences. It celebrates the outstanding achievements of the late Hirotugu Akaike.

West’s contributions to Bayesian statistics include seminal work in dynamic modeling and the implementation of nonparametric models that paved the way for practical data analyses via the first realization of large-scale simulation-based methods. West has also worked at the frontier of various research fields to which Bayesian statistics can be applied and contributed to the creation of data-driven sciences. For example, he established a new approach for biomarker discovery using gene expression data, thus creating a novel trend in -omics biology based on data analysis.

Read more about West’s work and the Akaike award.

Noel Cressie

Noel Cressie, distinguished professor at the University of Wollongong, was recently named a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He was inducted into the academy May 22 in Canberra, Australia.

The academy’s citation associated with his induction reads: 

“Noel Cressie is a world leader in statistical methodology for analyzing spatial and spatio-temporal data, and its applications to environmental science. His fundamental contributions changed the basic paradigm for analyzing observations in space and space-time. Cressie has also contributed to research on pollution monitoring, climate prediction, ocean health, soil chemistry, and glacier movement and is a NASA science team member for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission. Responding to the huge volumes of complex data in environmental research, Cressie has made ground-breaking innovations for ‘big data analytics’ for remote sensing and climate change.”