22 January 2018 13:05

The “outstanding” work of three Lancaster University academics has been recognised by the Royal Statistical Society.

Professor Peter Diggle and Dr Emanuele Giorgi are from Lancaster Medical School and Professor Idris Eckley is from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

Professor Eckley is Co-Director of both the Data Science Institute and the EPSRC-funded STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training.         

He has been awarded the RSS Greenfield Industrial Medal for his “high-quality research on change points and non-stationary time series which has made a substantial impact on a range of multinational companies. He has also led an exceptional culture change in the scale and diversity of industrially collaborative research in statistical doctoral training.”

Professor Diggle has been awarded the RSS Barnett Award and Lecture for environmental statistics. His research concerns the development and application of statistical methods relevant to the biomedical and health sciences.

The citation highlights “his outstanding and sustained contribution within the field of environmental statistics, particularly in relation to the area of environmental health sciences. He is one of the most distinguished and influential statisticians working in the area of developing and fitting statistical models to spatial and spatio-temporal data applied to the environmental sciences.”

Dr Giorgi researches the development of novel geostatistical methods for disease risk mapping with a particular focus on tropical diseases in Africa.

He has been awarded the RSS Research Prize for his “outstanding published contribution at the interface of statistics and epidemiology, spanning the development of spatial statistical methods, their application to a range of substantive problems in global population health research and their implementation in open-source software.”

All three are members of Lancaster’s Data Science Institute.  The Institute catalyses fundamental research into the foundations of Data Science together with cross-cutting theme areas including the environment, health, and industry.