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2019 Wiley-TIES Best Paper Award

Dr. Philip White, Assistant Professor of Statistics, was recently honored with the 2019 Wiley-TIES Best Paper Award for his work with Dr. Shane Reese and Dr. William Christensen on their research paper "A model for Antarctic Surface mass balance and ice core site detection". All submissions to the contest were considered for:

- Presenting novel theory or methodology for a relevant and current environmental application;

- Interesting data application with large potential for broad use; and

- Providing a significant contribution to environmetric research.

"A model for Antarctic Surface mass balance and ice core site detection" will be highlighted on the Environmetrics journal homepage, and Dr. White has been invited to present his paper at the prestigious Environmetrics Invited Session at the 2020 TIES Conference in London.

The study itself features the development of a model for Antarctic surface mass balance (SMB), which in turn allowed them to assess regional and global uncertainty in SMB estimation, further allowing them to carry out a model-based design to propose new measurement sites. It used a Bayesian Gaussian process generalized linear model for SMB to account for data attributes that demonstrated spatial autocorrelation, heteroscedasticity, and non-Gaussianity. The results of the study suggested a lower Antarctic SMB estimate than expected/previously reported, which may be indicative of a more dire diagnosis of the long-term health of the Antarctic ice sheets.

You can read the full paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/env.2579
It can also be viewed through https://twitter.com/StatisticsViews/status/1224737261700419584