Littlejohn Award

2024 Recipient: Tilman Davies

Dr Davies receives the Littlejohn Award in recognition of his excellent corpus of research published over the period 2020-2024. This work is primarily on spatial statistics, and is exemplified by five nominated articles.

  • The first, published in the Annals of Applied Statistics, employs thresholded hidden Gaussian conditional autoregressions to model a binary response that distinguishes slow from fast twitch fibres in a muscle cross-section, potentially leading to new insight into muscle aging and disease.
  • The second article, from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, uses a sophisticated and computationally demanding nearest-neighbour Gaussian process spatial factor model to relate levels of trace elements to environmental variables obtained at sampling sites in the South Island of New Zealand, while respecting likely spatial dependencies.
  • The next article, appearing in the journal Spatial Statistics, looks at point patterns on networks. Critically, many of the fundamental ideas and tools underpinning spatial processes in Euclidean space require adaptation, or simply fail, when applied to processes on networks. This highly cited paper provides a beautifully clear and wide-ranging review of the area.
  • The fourth article, from Statistical Science, is concerned with diffusion estimation of spatial intensity functions. The paper reviews existing diffusion smoothers, and then synthesizes and extends previous work to develop a highly practical methodology.
  • The final article, published in Spatial Statistics, addresses major theoretical and practical issues in fitting cluster process models to spatial point patterns. This work overturns the accepted wisdom that the problems were with the fitting methods, showing instead that the classical model parameterization was largely to blame.

Dr Davies’ methodological work is typically implemented in publicly available R packages. Through this software, his methods are being adopted across the world by researchers in numerous different disciplines.

The citation above is from Martin Hazelton.

This award recognizes excellence in research, based on publications during the five calendar years preceding the date of the award.

Next Round

  • Next round opens: TBA
  • Next round closes: TBA

Nominations should be sent to the Convenor of the NZSA Awards Committee, by email at vanessa.cave@auckland.ac.nz.

Award Details

Criteria

This award is based on original statistical research published in the last five calendar years. Candidates will normally have been residents of New Zealand for this period, and must be financial members of the Association.

Nominations

Nominations can be made by individuals or groups of individuals. Nominators may be non-NZSA members. Nominations will be assessed by the NZSA Awards Committee, and should include the following:

  • name, affiliation and contact details of nominator;
  • name and affiliation of candidate;
  • statement of general area of research;
  • names of two persons willing to act as referees;
  • a list of books and/or research articles published in the last five calendar years;
  • electronic copies of the each of the five most significant publications selected from the list above;
  • a clear statement of how much of any joint work is due to the candidate;
  • and a citation, of maximum 40 words, summarizing the statistical research underlying the application.

Background

The Littlejohn Research Award was established in 2013. It is named in commemoration of Roger Littlejohn, who  worked as a biometrician with AgResearch (formerly Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries), based at the Invermay Research Centre (Dunedin) for nearly 30 years.  A very practical and creative statistician, Roger devised innovative solutions to the many and diverse problems presented to him throughout his career.

Roger was an expert in the analysis of time series and in the application of hidden Markov models, and made major contributions in the analysis of hormone profiles and animal movement-behaviour studies.  He contributed to over 200 publications, and was a highly regarded contributor to the GenStat program.

Roger was a stalwart of the NZSA whose roles included that of President, Newsletter Editor and Webmaster.

Roger died in 2011, following a battle with secondary melanoma, having just turned 56.

Roger was posthumously awarded the 2011 Campbell Award in recognition of his significant contribution to the promotion and development of statistics in New Zealand.

 

If you have any queries about making a nomination/application for this award please email the Convenor of the NZSA Awards Committee.

YearRecipients of the Littlejohn Award 
2024Tilman Davies
2023Alain Vandal
2022Ting Wang
2021Russell Millar
2020Renate Meyer
2019Richard Arnold
2017Matt SchofieldNewsletter 80
2016Geoff Jones
2015Mark Holmes
2014Martin Hazelton
2013Richard Barker