Geostatistics is a branch of statistics focusing on spatial or spatiotemporal datasets. Developed originally to predict probability distributions of ore grades for mining operations, it is currently applied in diverse disciplines including petroleum geology, hydrogeology, hydrology, meteorology, oceanography, geochemistry, geometallurgy, geography, forestry, environmental control, landscape ecology, soil science, and agriculture. Geostatistics is applied in varied branches of geography, particularly those involving the spread of diseases (epidemiology), the practice of commerce and military planning (logistics), and the development of efficient spatial networks. Geostatistical algorithms are incorporated in many places, including geographic information systems (GIS).
Sir David John Spiegelhalter is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher.
Georges François Paul Marie Matheron was a French mathematician and civil engineer of mines, known as the founder of geostatistics and a co-founder of mathematical morphology. In 1968, he created the Centre de Géostatistique et de Morphologie Mathématique at the Paris School of Mines in Fontainebleau. He is known for his contributions on Kriging and mathematical morphology. His seminal work is posted for study and review to the Online Library of the Centre de Géostatistique, Fontainebleau, France.
Kantilal Vardichand "Kanti" Mardia is an Indian-British statistician specialising in directional statistics, multivariate analysis, geostatistics, statistical bioinformatics and statistical shape analysis. He was born in Sirohi, Rajasthan, India in a Jain family and now resides and works in Leeds. He is known for his series of tests of multivariate normality based measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis as well as work on the statistical measures of shape.
Sylvia Therese Richardson is a French/British Bayesian statistician and is currently Professor of Biostatistics and Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge. In 2021 she became the president of the Royal Statistical Society for the 2021–22 year.
Christopher C. Holmes is a British statistician. He has held the position of Professor of Biostatistics in Genomics in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford since September 2014, a post that carries with it a Fellowship of St Anne's College, Oxford. Previously he was titular Professor of Biostatistics and a Fellow of Lincoln College. After working in industry he completed his doctorate in Bayesian statistics at Imperial College, London, supervised by Adrian Smith.
James Durbin FBA was a British statistician and econometrician, known particularly for his work on time series analysis and serial correlation.
Robin L. Plackett was a statistician best known for his contributions to the history of statistics and to experimental design, most notably the Plackett–Burman designs.
Biostatistics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering biostatistics, that is, statistics for biological and medical research.
Julian Ernst Besag FRS was a British statistician known chiefly for his work in spatial statistics, and Bayesian inference.
John James Pullinger was the National Statistician for the United Kingdom, serving in this role from 1 July 2014 until retiring on 30 June 2019. He was succeeded on an interim basis by Deputy National Statistician Jonathan Athow, and by Sir Ian Diamond on a permanent basis from October 2019. He became Chairman of the Electoral Commission on 1 May 2021.
Sheila Macdonald Bird OBE FRSE FMedSci is a Scottish biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and BMJ series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Bird's doctoral work on non-proportional hazards in breast cancer found application in organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance (WASH) studies in prisons. Her work with Cooper on UK dietary bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposure revealed that the 1940–69 birth cohort was the most exposed and implied age-dependency in susceptibility to clinical vCJD progression from dietary BSE exposure since most vCJD cases were younger, born in 1970–89. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep which revolutionised the understanding of scrapie.
André Georges Journel is a French American engineer who excelled in formulating and promoting geostatistics in the earth sciences and engineering, first from the Centre of Mathematical Morphology in Fontainebleau, France and later from Stanford University.
Sudipto Banerjee is an Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and inference for spatial data analysis. He is Professor of Biostatistics and Senior Associate Dean in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He served as the Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at UCLA from 2014 through 2023. He served as the elected President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2022.
Noel Andrew Cressie is an Australian and American statistician. He is Distinguished Professor and Director, Centre for Environmental Informatics, at the University of Wollongong in Wollongong, Australia.
Carol Anne Gotway Crawford is an American mathematical statistician and from 2018 to 2020 served as Chief Statistician of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). She joined the GAO in May 2017. From August 2014 to April 2017, she was with the Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. She was formerly at the National Center for Environmental Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She also holds an adjunct faculty position at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, and is an expert in biostatistics, spatial analysis, environmental statistics, and the statistics of public health. She also maintains an interest in geoscience and has held executive roles in the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences.
Amanda G. Chetwynd is a British mathematician and statistician specializing in combinatorics and spatial statistics. She is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Provost for Student Experience, Colleges and the Library at Lancaster University, and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Melanie Marie Wall is an American psychiatric biostatistician, psychometrician, and mental health data scientist who works at Columbia University as a professor in the departments of biostatistics and psychiatry, and as director of Mental Health Data Science, a joint project of the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, and New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her research has included topics such as grief and depression, eating disorders, marijuana use and abuse, and correlations between school performance and athletic activity, studied using latent variable models, spatial analysis, and longitudinal data. She is co-editor of the book Surviving Vietnam: Psychological Consequences of the War for US Veterans.
Jorge Mateu is a Spanish mathematician, author, and academic. He is a professor of Statistics within the Department of Mathematics at University Jaume I of Castellon and Director of the Unit Eurocop for Data Science in criminal activities in the same department.
