Corcoran Memorial Lectures

The Corcoran Memorial lectures are named in memory of Stephen Corcoran, a DPhil student in the Department of Statistics. Stephen's research was in the field of empirical likelihood. He made substantial progress in this work but sadly his thesis remained unfinished at the time of his death from cancer in 1996. Part of Stephen's uncompleted thesis was edited by Professor A.C. Davison and published in Biometrika (1998, pp 967-972).

A family bequest established a lecture in honour of Stephen in which distinguished guest lecturers are invited to deliver a lecture on important aspects of their work. In addition, the Corcoran Memorial Prize is awarded every two years to students of the Department of Statistics for outstanding graduate work. The prizewinners are also invited to give a lecture.

Corcoran Memorial Prize Winners

2014       Dr Therese Graversen, Statistical and Computational Methodology for the Analysis of Forensic DNA Mixtures with Artefacts

2012       Dr Robin Ryder,  Phylogenetic Models of Language Diversification

2010       Dr Christopher Yau, Statistical Methodologies for the Detection of Copy Number Variation in Mammalian Genomes from High-Throughput Genomic Datasets

2008       Dr Chris Spencer, Human Genetic Variation and the Evidence for Natural Selection
               and Dr Ludger Evers, Model Fitting and Model Selection for "Mixture of Experts" Models

2006       Dr Simon Myers, The Detection of Recombination Events Using DNA Sequence Data

2004       Dr Anja Sturm, On Spatially Structured Population Processes and relations to Stochastic Partial  Differential Equations 

2002       Dr Yih-Choung Teh, Critical Thresholds for Dynamic Routing in Queueing Networks  

2000       Dr Matthew Stephens, Bayesian methods for mixtures of normal distributions       

1998       Dr Mark Mathieson, Ordered Classes and Predictive Methods in Pattern Recognition       

Past Lecturers

2015   Professor Arthur Gretton, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London

2013   Professor Nils Lid Hjort (Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo)

2007  Professor David Spiegelhalter FRS, MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge

2003   Professor Terry Speed, The Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne & Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley

2002  Professor Anthony Davison, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne

2001  Professor Peter Hall, Australian National University

2000   Professor Bernard Silverman, University of Bristol

1999   Professor Peter McCullagh, University of Chicago

1998   Professor Adrian Smith, Imperial College, London

1997   Professor Don Rubin, Harvard University