The Nick Smith Prize is awarded to the Statistics PhD students during their 18 month appraisal on the basis of their excellence in research. This award is in memory of Dr Nick Smith, a member of staff who tragically died in a climbing accident.

Pavel’s work focuses on methods of dose-finding studies for combination treatments, as a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher supervised by Professor Thomas Jaki. Pavel has developed a novel method for dose-finding that does not require knowledge of the underlying ordering of doses. His approach is not only innovative in that it does not require knowing the ordering, but also in that it utilises information theory in the context of such clinical trials for the first time. One of his papers with his supervisor is under review while another paper is being prepared for submission.

Ben Norwood’s work focuses on long memory and changepoint models in finance and economics, supervised by Dr Rebecca Killick. Time series from such area may actually contain a ‘changepoint’ (a point within the series where the data generating process has changed). Using the wavelet spectrum, Ben used a classification approach to determine the most appropriate model (long memory or changepoint) for such data. A joint paper with his supervisor has been accepted for publication in Statistics & Computing. Ben has also presented this work at CMStatistics in December 2016.