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Corcoran Memorial Lectures

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Photograph by Jennie McKenzie

The Corcoran Memorial lectures are named in memory of Stephen Corcoran who was a graduate student in the Department of Statistics until his death in 1996. Stephen was a student of Wadham College, Oxford and graduated First Class Honours in Mathematics in 1991. He subsequently gained a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics from Cambridge University before returning to Oxford to study for a D.Phil in 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. Part of Stephen's uncompleted thesis was edited by Professor A. C. Davison and published in Biometrika (1998, pages 967-972).

A family bequest has established an annual 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

1998

Dr Mark Mathieson
`Ordered Classes and Predictive Methods in Pattern Recognition'

2000

Dr Matthew Stephens
`Bayesian methods for mixtures of normal distributions'

2002

Dr Yih-Choung Teh
`Critical Thresholds for Dynamic Routing in Queueing Networks'

2004

Dr Anja Sturm (lecture notes)
'On Spatially Structured Population Processes and relations to Stochastic Partial Differential Equations'

2006

 
2008 

 
2008 

Dr Simon Myers (lecture notes)
'The Detection of Recombination Events Using DNA Sequence Data'

Dr. Chris Spencer (lecture notes)
'Human Genetic Variation and the Evidence for Natural Selection' 

Dr Ludger Evers (lecture notes)
'Model Fitting and Model Selection for "Mixture of Experts" Models'

Abstracts from 2009 Corcoran Prize Lectures  pdficon_large  and Word
 

Past Lecturers

1997

Professor Don Rubin, Harvard University
'Techniques for Drawing Causal Inferences from Imperfect Studies' 

1998

Professor Adrian Smith, Imperial College, London
'Bayesian curves, CARTS and MARS' 

1999

Professor Peter McCullagh, University of Chicago
'Re-sampling and exchangeable arrays'
'Linear models and representation theory'

2000

 Professor Bernard Silverman, University of Bristol
'Using wavelet methods to fit models for time-frequency dependence' 

2001

 Professor Peter Hall, Australian National University
'Non-parametric inference under constraints' 

2002

 Professor Anthony Davison, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne
'Galaxies, ticks and stock market crashes' hard times for the Poisson process'

2003

Professor Terry Speed, The Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne & Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley
'Measuring Gene Expression: Why Biologists Do, and Why Statisticians should show an interest'

2007

Professor David Spiegelhalter FRS, MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge
'Bayesian evidence synthesis 1': Meta-analysis allowing for the rigour and relevance of studies'   and
'Bayesian evidence synthesis 2': Evaluating the introduction of a high-risk operation for convenital heart disease'