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 2025-26, the Postgraduate Research Committee has nominated Kristína Grolmusová (Supervisor: Jenny Wadsworth) as the winner of the Nick Smith Prize for her excellence in research. The prize commemorates a member of staff who tragically died in a climbing accident.

Kristína's work focuses on the problem of estimating the risk of floods simultaneously at multiple locations along a river network. In her first project, recent existing work on geometric extremal graphical models was applied to extreme river flows at 10 locations around Preston. By using the geometric extremal graphical models, the structure of the river network was incorporated into the model and created a parsimonious model that allows estimation of the flood risk at more locations than has been previously done in the framework of geometric extremes.

Kristína also took part in the Extreme Value Analysis (EVA) 2025 Data Challenge, in which she and three other PhD students/postdocs worked with a precipitation data on a 5x5 grid in the eastern United States from a large ensemble of climate model runs. The challenge focused on three quantities of interest related to the spatial extent and/or temporal duration of extreme rainfall, each requiring extrapolation. They used the models within the spatial geometric framework for analysing the spatial extent and considered a sampling procedure that retained the temporal information in the data, thereby enabling estimation of the duration of extreme rainfall events. The paper has now been accepted for a special EVA 2025 Data Challenge issue in Extremes.

Congratulations to Kristína!