Winners of the Abdel El-Shaarawi Early Investigator's Award

Year Winner(s)  Citation
2023 Abhirup Datta
Johns Hopkins University, USA 
"For key contributions to theoretical, methodological and applied statistics and machine learning approaches for the analysis of spatially and temporally oriented data and their applications to the environmental sciences and public health; for prolific open-access and publicly available software development; for being a role model in advising and mentoring of students and junior colleagues; and for synergistic activities related to TIES and the broader environmental statistics community."
2022 Raphaël Huser
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia 
"In recognition of the fundamental contributions to the statistics of extremes, particularly, the development of new subasymptotic models for spatial extremes and new statistical models for high-impact and rare events in univariate, multivariate, spatial, and spatiotemporal settings, in order to solve key methodological and applied problems and to improve risk assessment of complex extreme events in a vast array of applications—of which geo-environmental and climate applications are a major focus."
2021

Stefano Castruccio
University of Notre Dame, USA

"For his contributions on fundamentally crucial topics in the context of computationally efficient modeling of spatial and spatio-temporal dependence.  His applied research spans from air pollution monitoring with satellite data to multi-decadal climate prediction,  including visualization of uncertainty for global spatiotemporal models and wind energy optimization. He is actively collaborating with many scientists from very different backgrounds, as proven by the numerous grants and projects in which he is currently involved".
2020 Andrew Zammit-Mangion
University of Wollongong, Australia
"For achievements in interdisciplinary work in Environmental Statistics and in the development of important computational instruments for space-time data analysis, in addition to active involvement in TIES."
2019 Amanda Hering
Baylor University, USA
"For significant and outstanding contributions to the environmental statistical and quantitative research as proved by the number and quality of publications in the statistical literature. She has strong interdisciplinary connections with other scientific communities, especially with respect to important environmental problems. She is also the recipient of highly-rated, externally-funded research projects. She has had long-term involvement with the Environmetrics community, together with being an Associate Editor for the Environmetrics journal."
2018 Claire Miller
University of Glasgow
"For outstanding contributions to environmental statistical and quantitative research with a special focus on water quality, including functional data, time series clustering and dimension reduction for spatiotemporal flow-connected network data. She has shown strong interactions with other scientific communities, in particular for dealing with environmental problems. She has shown a strong commitment to the Environmetrics community, covering various positions for The International Environmetrics Society, the organisation of various Environmetrics-related conferences and activities, together with being an Associate Editor for the journal of Environmetrics."
2016 Ying Sun
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
"For outstanding contributions to Environmental Statistics, in particular in the areas of spatio-temporal statistics, functional data analysis, visualization, and for her distinguished service to the profession."
2015 Murali Haran
Department of Statistics, Penn State University, USA
"For outstanding contributions to statistical modeling in multiple areas, including inference for large non-Gaussian spatial data, spatial interaction point processes, compartmental models, and efficient MCMC methods for spatial models; for path breaking contributions to applications in environmental sciences such as climate change and paleoclimate reconstructions; for strong leadership and mentorship; and for sustained and distinguished service to the environmetrics community."
2014 Yulia R. Gel
University of Texas at Dallas, USA and University of Waterloo, Canada
"For sustained and significant methodological contributions around high dimensional inference for temporal and spatial processes, spatiotemporal modeling, and robust nonparametric resampling approaches, for strong impact in areas such as climate change, hydrology, ecology and epidemiology, and for an outstanding professional contribution and outreach."
2013 Joanna Flemming
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dalhousie University, Canada
"For distinguished contributions to the development of novel statistical methodology to study marine biodiversity and sustainability, for passionate promotion of environmetrics by bridging the interdisciplinary gap between oceanography, marine biology and modern statistical science, and for excellence in interdisciplinary mentoring of a future generation of Environmetricians."
Petra Kuhnert
CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics, Australia
"For significant interdisciplinary collaboration and impact, the promotion and development of cutting edge statistical methods in the environmental sciences, particularly in water quality, fisheries, and ecological research, and strong contributions to expert elicitation, Bayesian hierarchical modelling, and non­‐parametric regression."
2012 Peter Craigmile
Department of Statistics, Ohio State University, USA
"He is a statistician who has done a relevant work in the analysis of time series with long-term memory structure, in spatial extremes and other spatial analyses, with applications to climatology and environmental health. In particular, he has developed spectral and wavelet methods to investigate dependency structures and to analyze periodicities and trends. This kind of procedures are very useful in the analysis of climate time series. He is a member of the American Statistical Association - Advisory Committee on Climate Change Policy."
2011 N/A
2010 Marc Genton
Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University, USA
"He is a world-leading statistician who has made fundamental contributions in statistical theory and practice, in teaching, and in service to the statistical community. He wrote an impressive number of theoretical and applied papers on several topics linked to environmetrics (climate science, paleoclimate reconstructions, precipitation analysis, pollutants studies, and wind power forecasting) and significantly contributed to disseminate knowledge with over 170 presentations at scientific conferences."
2009 Sudipto Banerjee
Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota, USA
"For key research findings in hierarchical Bayesian modeling of spatially oriented data, with particular emphasis on applications in forestry and in environmental exposures and related health outcomes, for developing related computing methods, software, and textbook materials, and for editorial service to the profession."
2008 Bronwyn Harch
CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, Australia
"For contributions to the construction of biological indexes for freshwater quality; for development of monitoring programs for water quality; for outstanding leadership and group building in CSIRO; for valuable contributions to TIES as conference organizer, treasurer, and board member."
Alexandra Schmidt
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
"For contributions to spatio-temperal modeling of heterogeneous and non-separable processes; for contributions to multivariate spatial statistics; for organizing workshops and short courses both nationally and internationally."
2005-2007 N/A
2004 Lance A. Waller
Department of Biostatistics, Emory University, USA
"Dr Waller has a sustained record of outstanding contribution to environmetric research, dating back to his dissertation under Professor Bruce Turnbull at Cornell where he studied statistical methods for disease clustering. Not only has Dr Waller made important contributions in terms of statistical methods for the spatio-temporal modeling of disease and environmental data, but he has become a leading figure in the application of these methods in areas such as epidemiology, geography and geographical information systems. His contributions to the area of environmental justice are also noteworthy."
2003 Montserrat Fuentes
Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, USA
"For significant developments in modeling and prediction for spatial-temporal processes and Bayesian spatial statistics; with applications in climate and air quality modeling, oceanography, atmospheric and environmental sciences."
2002 Brad Carlin
Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, USA
"For significant developments in Bayesian modeling and Monte Carlo implementation, with applications to spatial disease mapping, environmental equity, longitudinal studies, and models for HIV/AIDS."


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