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 2024-25, the Postgraduate Research Committee has nominated James Neill (Supervisors: Chris Jewell and Lloyd Chapman) 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.

James’s work focuses on modelling the transmission of antimicrobially-resistant bacteria in community and healthcare settings. He has developed a novel Bayesian inference method for discrete infectious disease processes by considering a non-centered approach to data-augmentation MCMC. This approach is innovative as it uses the transmission model in the proposal step of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm rather than in the accept-reject step, in contrast to traditional reversible-jump MCMC for infectious disease models. This has led to a paper with his supervisors that has been submitted to the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics.

Congratulations to James!