The Nick Smith Prize is awarded to a Statistics PhD student in their second year on the basis of their excellence in research and involvement with the department. We are very pleased to announce that for the academic year 2017-18, the Postgraduate Research Committee has nominated Sam Tickle(Supervisors: Idris Eckley and Paul Fearnhead) as the winner of the Nick Smith Prize for his excellence in research. The prize commemorates a member of staff who tragically died in a climbing accident.

Sam is working in the area of computationally efficient methods for detecting changepoints. To date he has worked on two aspects of this problem. First he has looked at how existing methods can be adapted so that they can be implemented within a parallel computing environment. This work has led to a substantive paper that has been submitted to the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. More recently Sam has been working on efficient methods for detecting changes in multivariate data. This is already proceeding well, with Sam having made both methodological and theoretical contributions.

Moreover, the Committee highlighted Sam's substantial contribution to the life and community of the STOR-i CDT. His team-spirit is second to none, always willing to meet with visitors and prospective students, coordinating and leading a series of weekend social activities for the STOR-interns, and helping to set up and co-ordinate the activities of a PhD student reading group.

Congratulations to Sam!