Warwick professor receives Guy Medal

At the Royal Statistical Society’s annual conference on 3rd September, Professor Gareth Roberts was awarded the Guy Medal in Silver for 2008 to go along with his Guy Medal in Bronze which he won nine years ago.

The Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to those who deserve special merit for work that has been read at an Ordinary Meeting of the Royal Statistical Society and/or has been published in the Society’s journals. Professor Gareth Robert was awarded his meal for special contributions that he has made to the theory, methodology and applications of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and especially for three papers read to the Society and which have been published over the past two decades.

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a class of algorithms for sampling from probability distributions based on constructing a Markov chain that has the desired distribution as its equilibrium distribution. The state of the chain after a large number of steps is then used as a sample from the desired distribution. The quality of the sample improves as a function of the number of steps.

Professor Roberts thanked many of those who have influenced his work and contributed substantially to his work, particularly Jeff Rosenthaland Omiros Papasiliopoulos, and also paid tribute to the support given to him by his family and his wife Deborah.