UQ’s Professor Geoff McLachlan has been awarded the Statistical Society of Australia’s highest honour to recognise his "outstanding achievement in, and contribution to, the discipline of statistics".
Professor McLachlan is only the 18th recipient of the Pitman Medal since it was first awarded in 1978.
Presenting the award in December, SSA Vice-President Professor Kerrie Mengersen echoed experts’ comments when she said: "Professor McLachlan had taken a very difficult area (mixture models) and made it accessible on a much wider scale.
"He has played a very large role in the much greater use and understanding of mixture models throughout the world over the past 30 years,” Professor Mengersen said.
“A further very important characteristic is his preparedness to look beyond mainstream statistics for cognate areas (such as machine learning), where his particular strengths are of substantial benefit. The impact he has made in bioinformatics is even more important and commendable, as reflected in his monographs and in many talks and papers that have been well-received by the bioinformatics community.”
As an ISI Highly Cited Author, Professor McLachlan is part of an elite club of less than half of one percent of all published researchers in the world.
He has published six monographs, 20 book chapters and more than 140 articles in peer-reviewed literature.
He has a personal chair in statistics in UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics, and a joint appointment with the Institute for Molecular Bioscience.
He currently holds an ARC Professorial Fellowship and is a chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics.
Media: Professor Geoff McLachlan (07 3365 2150, g.mclachlan@uq.edu.au) or
Ms Aarti Kapoor (07 3346 9935, a.kapoor@uq.edu.au)
