Pavel Mozgunov is awarded the Nick Smith Prize

Nick Smith Prize is awarded to the Statistics PhD students during their 18 month appraisal on the basis of their excellence in research. We are very pleased to announce that for this year the Postgraduate Research Committee nominated Pavel Mozgunov (Supervisor: Thomas Jaki) and Ben Norwood (Supervisor: Rebecca Killick) as the joint winner of the Nick Smith Prize for their research excellence.

Pavel’s work focuses on methods of dose-finding studies for combination treatments. Pavel has developed a novel method for dose-finding that does not require knowledge of the underlying ordering of doses. His approach is not only innovative in that it does not require knowing the ordering, but also in that it utilises information theory in the context of such clinical trials for the first time. One of his papers with his supervisor (Thomas Jaki) is under review for JRSS C while another paper is being prepared for submission to JRSS B.

Ben Norwood’s work focuses on long memory and changepoint models in finance and economics. Time series from such area may actually contain a ‘changepoint’ (a point within the series where the data generating process has changed). Using the wavelet spectrum, Ben used a classification approach to determine the most appropriate model (long memory or changepoint) for such data. A joint paper with his supervisor Rebecca Killick on this has been accepted for publication in Statistics & Computing. Ben has also presented this work at CMStatistics in December 2016.

Congratulations to Pavel and Ben!