Leverhulme Prize

Dr Stephen Brooks has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize in recognition of his research achievements. The prize is worth £ 50,000 and is to support research over a two-year period.

Stephen Brooks is an outstanding young statistician who has won the highest international regard for his fundamental contributions to statistics, his expertise in statistical computing and his applied work in population ecology. He is a leading international figure in Bayesian computation and has made seminal contributions in developing methodology and diagnostic techniques for Markov chain Monte Carlo (McMC) approaches to model fitting, and in stochastic optimisation. His research into reversible jump methods, which provide a fully Bayesian technique for model choice, has been especially important in providing a general framework for the efficient use of these methods. In his applied work, Stephen Brooks has used his specialist knowledge of McMC methods to develop models for the spread of infectious diseases in agricultural crops and farmed animals. He has also looked at a wide range of other applications including population monitoring of endangered species. The models incorporate environmental and individual variation, thus allowing deep insights into the processes involved and facilitating their management and control.

In all 25 prizes were awarded by the Leverhulme Trustees in the disciplines of Anthropolgy; Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences; Economics; Mathematics and Statistics; and Medieval, Early Modern and Modern History.

For further information about the Trust, please see www.leverhulme.org.uk.