The Young Biometrician Award
Co-sponsored by the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society and the Fisher Memorial Trust
The British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society, jointly with the Fisher Memorial Trust, award a prize every two years for young biometricians (no more than 5 years since completing full-time education), who are members of the British and Irish Region of the International Biometric Society. The award will recognise the research of one paper published, or accepted for publication, in a refereed journal. This award comprises a diploma and a prize of £1000.
2025 Award
Nominations are now open for the 2025 YBA.
To make a nomination, simply send a copy of the paper with a covering message, to the BIR Regional Secretary (secretary@bir.biometricsociety.org) before the 30th June. Note that self-nominations are not allowed and, for co-authored papers, a full statement of the contribution from the young biometrician is also required.
2023 Award
We are happy to announce that the winner of the 2023 Young Biometrician Award is Dr Oliver Crook, a Florence Nightingale Fellow (Senior Research Associate) in the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, for his paper “Semi-Supervised Nonparametric Bayesian Modelling of Spatial Proteomics” (The Annals of Applied Statistics, 2022).
The panel felt that Oliver’s paper was extremely well written, with a clear description of an impressive technical analysis and implementation of complex stochastic modelling. The paper gave a clear, readable outline of the application area and spatial proteomics, and provided ample justification for the approach. The modelling required was challenging, but Oliver’s dealt with each issue carefully and thoroughly and the end result was genuinely innovative and, ultimately, should prove useful to biologists – especially as software used in the paper has been included in an existing R package.
The judges also felt that another nominee warranted an honourable mention – namely Dr John Addy, a Statistical Data Scientist, Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, for his work “A heteroskedastic model of Park Grass spring hay yields in response to weather suggests continuing yield decline with climate change in future decades” (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2022).
The panel agreed that John’s work was a high-quality interdisciplinary paper, with advanced statistical models applied rigorously to an important long-term grasslands data set in the context of climate change. The findings are clearly explained and the implications for society highlighted – this is likely to be a highly cited paper.
The panel of three judges comprised Professors Rosemary Bailey (University of St Andrews, representing the FMT), Elizabeth Thompson (University of Washington, international judge) and Mark Brewer (BIOSS, representing the BIR).
2021 Award
The 2021 Young Biometrician Awards have been won by Hélène Ruffieux of the MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge University, for her paper "A global-local approach for detecting hotspots in multipleresponse regression" (The Annals of Applied Statistics, 2020), and by Richard Glennie of the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews, for his paper "Open population maximum likelihood spatial capture‐recapture" published in Biometrics (2019). This is the first time this award has been tied, and shared by two individuals.
The panel of judges felt Richard's paper represented a very considerable step forward for capture-recapture models in both theory and implementation. By reframing the spatial capturerecapture problem in terms of hidden Markov models, the paper offers important and novel insights into sources of variation and bias. The authors explained modelling and inference exceptionally clearly, and demonstrated the power of their approach in a fascinating and challenging analysis of jaguar abundance in Belize.
Hélène's paper offered a mathematically impressive, tractable analytic approximation to Bayesian inference in the difficult, highdimensional problem of hotspot detection in statistical genetics, and demonstrated clear improvements over existing approaches. The work combines novel methodological contributions in both model specification and inference, and the judges expressed their admiration for the paper's combination of technical sophistication and practical utility.
The judges also gave an honourable mention to Théo Michelot of the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling, University of St Andrews, for his paper "Inference in MCMC step selection models" (Biometrics, 2019). Théo's paper offered an elegant analogy between habitat selection models and Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, and an accomplished translation of this big idea into the details of zebra habitat modelling that provided new understanding to this field.
The judges this year were Andrew Mead (Rothamsted Research, representing the Fisher Memorial Trust), Daniel Farewell (Cardiff University, representing the British & Irish Region of the International Biometric Society), and Kerrie Mengersen (Queensland University of Technology, and this year's international judge). The judges were delighted with the high quality of all the entries received. The future of biometry remains very bright!
2019 Award
We are delighted to announce that the BIR-FMT 2019 Young Biometrician Award has been won by Sean Yiu for the paper “Covariate association eliminating weights: a unified weighting framework for causal effect estimation” (Biometrika 2018; 105, 709-722).
The panel also gave honourable mention to Sara Wade for the paper “A Bayesian nonparametric regression model with normalized weights: a study of hippocampal atrophy in Alzeimer’s diseas” (Journal of the American Statistical Association 2014; 109, 477-490) and to Ming Zhou for the paper “Removal models accounting for temporary emigration” (Biometrics 2019; 75, 24-35).
2017 Award
The 2017 Young Biometrician Award has been won by Anaïs Rouanet of the MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, for her paper “Joint latent class model for longitudinal data and interval-censored semi-competing events: application to dementia” (Biometrics 2016; 72: 1123-1135). The Region was delighted that Anaïs was able to join past winners speaking at our regional meeting on 28th November 2017.
The judges commented that “The paper addresses the important issue of cognitive decline and dementia in later life. It deals with longitudinal data, in which the onset of dementia is interval-censored. The paper is both technically impressive and well explained, and complete code is provided to make the methodology accessible to others.” The award includes a diploma and a prize of £1000 and will be presented at a BIR meeting on 28th November.
The panel also gave honourable mention to Emily Dennis of Butterfly Conservation & the University of Kent for her paper “A generalised abundance index for seasonal invertebrates” (Biometrics 2016; 72: 1305–1314), and to David Hughes of the University of Liverpool for his paper “Dynamic longitudinal discriminant analysis using multiple longitudinal markers of different types” (Statistical Methods in Medical Research 2016, epub).
The panel of three judges comprised Professors Rosemary Bailey (University of St Andrews, representing the FMT), Simon Thompson (University of Cambridge, representing the BIR) and Graham Hepworth (University of Melbourne, international judge). The judges commented: "We are pleased to note that there were many more nominations this year than previously. We should like to make clear that new, sound, interesting methodology for a genuine biometrical problem, presented and explained well, was our primary criterion for judging. We did not focus on longitudinal data; nor did we insist on accompanying software."