The Royal Society of New South Wales was delighted to learn of the awarding of the Mitchell Prize by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis to one of its Fellows, Distinguished Professor Noel Cressie FRSN FAA, from the University of Wollongong (UoW).

The prize, awarded in August 2023 at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto, Canada, recognises an outstanding paper that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem. In this case, Professor Cressie was the senior co-author of the paper Zammit-Mangion, A., Bertolacci, M., Fisher, J., Stavert, A., Rigby, M., Cao, Y., and Cressie, N. (2022). WOMBAT v1.0: a fully Bayesian global flux-inversion framework. Geoscientific Model Development, 15, 45-73 (doi:10.5194/gmd-15-45-2022) that involved collaborations between statisticians and atmospheric chemists. This work estimates sources and sinks of carbon dioxide around the globe to suggest mitigation strategies in support of net-zero carbon emissions.

Professor Cressie, who is currently the Director of the Centre for Environmental Informatics at UoW undertook his undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Western Australia and subsequently graduated with a PhD from Princeton University.  Much of his professional life has been spent in the USA, serving as a professor and distinguished professor at Iowa State University and Ohio State University, before taking up his current role at UoW in 2012.

The Council of the Society extends warm congratulations to Professor Cressie on this recent recognition of his important work.