(l to r) Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) president John Petkau, Richard Lockhart and SSC Awards Chair Christian Léger.

Richard Lockhart, a professor in the department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at SFU, has been awarded the 2015 Gold Medal by the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC). The award is the highest honor the SSC bestows and was presented to Lockhart at the SSC’s Annual Meeting in Halifax.

The award cites Lockhart’s “outstanding contributions to statistical inference and methodology; for development of asymptotic distribution theory and rigorous justification of procedures in applied statistics through his deep knowledge of analysis, probability, and theoretical statistics; for the breadth of his contributions notably on goodness-of-fit, signal processing, stochastic processes, use of the Box-Cox transformation, smoothing, and the lasso, among others."

Lockhart’s contributions to the study of statistics also extends to his professional service on numerous committee and advisory boards such as the Canadian Journal of Statistics, the journal Technometrics, the Statistical Society of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Lockhart is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

SFU’s department of Statistics and Actuarial Science chair, Tom Loughin notes, “Richard is renowned nationally and internationally for his research excellence and his ability to work very deeply in a broad range of topics. To stand and talk with him at a society social function is to be interrupted by a continual stream of friends and colleagues---a veritable who's who in Canadian statistics. It is easy to see the friendship and respect that so many members of SSC have for Richard.”

Lockhart says "I am very grateful to my colleagues in the society for the recognition and to those who put my name forward for this award. I am extraordinary flattered (and somewhat embarrassed) to be included on a list of so many people I admire in my discipline.  I find it quite hard to see myself as being in that league.”