We are pleased to announce that our member Professor Fionn Murtagh won this year’s IAA Award for Outstanding Contributions to Astrostatics.
Mr. Murtagh is professor of Data Science and Statistics at the University of Derby in the UK and works part-time as a professor of data science at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is on the organizing committee of the initial IAU Commission B3 Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics (2015-2018), past president of the Classification Society (2008-2009) as well as past president of the British Classification Society (2007-2010). Professor Murtagh currently is on the Council of the International Association for Statistical Computing and is editor-in-chief of the Computer Journal, the foremost publication of the British Computer Society. He furthermore is an elected member of both the Royal Irish Academy and the Academia Europaea, and is a fellow of the British Computer Society and fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. Murtagh also is co-author with Jean-Luc Starck of two editions of the well-received book, Astronomical Image and Data Analysis (2006, Springer). Aside from Prof. Murtagh’s work in classification, he also was an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg’s Astronomical Observatory and for twelve years (1984-1996) he was a senior scientist at the European Space Agency working on the Hubble Space Telescope project.
We wish to send Professor Fionn Murtagh our kindest regards and congratulate him on his outstanding performance and the well-deserved award