We are delighted to relay that Pierre Jacob, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, has been awarded the Royal Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Bronze for this research. The citation is below. The first Guy medal was awarded in 1892 (to Charles Booth), the first Guy Medal in Bronze in 1936 (to W. G Cochran).
Guy Medal in Bronze – Pierre E Jacob
The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to Pierre Jacob for his innovative and fundamental contributions to Bayesian and computational statistics, including the paper, ‘Unbiased Markov chain Monte Carlo with couplings’ (with J O’Leary and Y Atchade) which was read to the society in 2019, and which introduces new solutions to the long-standing problem of how to remove bias from MCMC estimators. Other notable work includes the highly-cited paper ‘SMC^2: An efficient algorithm for sequential analysis of state-space models’ (with N Chopin and O Papaspiliopoulos), published in JRSS B in 2013, that presented a principled sequential sampler for online Bayesian inference that avoids the sample degeneracy that afflicted many earlier approaches; and the 2019 JRSS B paper, ‘Approximate Bayesian computation with the Wasserstein distance’ (with E Bernton, M Gerber and CP Robert), that introduced new ideas and approaches to inference for complex models which are easy to simulate from but otherwise intractable.