2008 Prize Winners
The second round of the prize has been held and the prize winners selected by a panel of eminent judges. The presentation was made on 8th July by Sheila Bird, RSS Vice President.
This year it had been decided to split the prize into two streams - one for people reading maths or statistics and another for the rest. The standard of the work of all entrants was very commendable and the winners in particular are to be congratulated.
In the 'rest' stream, no entry was considered to warrant a gold award but the silver award was given to Lam Chung (Stan) Yan from Bangor Business School for his work entitled 'Political institutions and economic growth - an empirical investigation'. As Stan was in Hong Kong, his work was presented by his tutor, John Goddard.For the maths and statistics stream, the bronze award was given to Susanna Rogers from Sheffield University for her work entitled 'Statistical approaches in the timing of animal extinctions' which looked at errors in radiocarbon dating. The silver award was given to Helen Cumberland, also from Sheffield University, for her work entitled 'Medical statistics: survival analysis' that dealt with hip replacement implants. The gold award was given to Vanessa Rigby from Manchester University for her work 'Statistical inference for epidemics' which looked at the spread of flu and measles within a household. All winners presented their work very ably to an audience of experienced statisticians, which must have been very daunting.
The 2008 winners
From the left: Vanessa Rigby, Susanna Rogers, Sheila Bird (Vice President, RSS), Helen Cumberland and John Goddard (Stan's tutor)
(Photo by Nick Fieller, Helen's tutor)