Bronze Medal to Jonas Peters from the Royal Statistical Society

"I could not feel more honoured to receive the RSS Guy Medal. Many thanks to all my wonderful collaborators. Causality tries to answer how we can improve systems by performing interventions. It may also help us to build robust models that can still be used if the system changes. It is an exciting and important research field. I feel that the award recognizes that", says Jonas Peters.

The Royal Statistical Society writes:

“The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to Jonas Peters for important and innovative contributions to causal inference and related statistical methodology and theory. Of particular note are his two papers in JRSSB, namely 'Kernel-based tests for joint independence' (with N Pfister, P Bühlmann and B. Schölkopf), published in 2017, and 'Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals' (with P Bühlmann and N Meinshausen), which was read to the Society in 2016.”

Jonas is an associate professor in statistics at the University of Copenhagen. Previously, he has been a group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen and a Marie Curie fellow at the Seminar for Statistics, ETH Zurich. He studied Mathematics at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Cambridge and did his PhD both at the MPI Tuebingen and ETH Zurich.

He is interested in inferring causal relationships from data and, more recently, in exploiting causal ideas for building statistical methods that are robust with respect to distributional shifts. In his research, Jonas tries to combine theory, methodology, and applications. His work relates to areas such as computational statistics, graphical models, independence testing or high-dimensional statistics.

Jonas received The Carlsberg Foundation’s Distinguished Associate Professor Fellowship in 2017 and in 2018 a research grant from the VILLUM Young Investigator Programme.

The Guy Medals

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS), founded in 1834, is one of the world's most distinguished and renowned statistical societies. It is a learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics, data and evidence for the public good. Today the Society has around 10,000 members around the world.

The Guy Medals are awarded in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. Established in memory of the distinguished physician and statistician William Augustus Guy FRS (1810-85).

The Guy Medal in Gold is awarded to a Fellow of the Society judged to have merited a signal mark of distinction by reason of innovative contributions to the theory or application of statistics.

The Guy Medal in Silver is awarded to a Fellow of the Society in respect of a paper of special merit. It was awarded to Danish Professor Steffen L. Lauritzen in 1996.

The Guy Medal in Bronze is awarded to a Fellow of the Society in respect of excellent work in statistics within fifteen years of the award of their first degree.

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