The international prize in statistics is awarded every two years by a collaboration among five leading international statistics organizations: the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the International Biometric Society, the International Statistical Institute, and the Royal Statistical Society. The prize recognizes a major achievement by an individual or team in the statistics field, particularly an achievement of powerful and original ideas that have led to practical applications and breakthroughs in other disciplines. The International Prize in Statistics for 2025 was announced recently, and the winner is Grace Wahba. This episode of Stats+Stories is all about celebrating her career with her former students, Finbarr O'Sullivan and Douglas Nychka.

Finbarr O’Sullivan is a Senior Post-Doctoral researcher and Associate Director in the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology at Dublin City University. He has research interests in corneal biology and in limbal stem cell culture techniques for corneal epithelial replacement. In conjunction with collaborators in The Royal Victoria Eye & Ear Hospital, Dublin and the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) he has developed the technique of using such cultures to treat corneal-limbal epithelial stem deficiency. This technique received regulatory approval in January 2016 and was used on June 2016 in the clinic for the first time.

Douglas Nychka is a statistician who works in applications for the environment. Douglas Nychka is a statistician and data scientist whose areas of research include the theory, computation and application of curve and surface fitting with a focus on geophysical and environmental applications. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the Colorado School of Mines and Senior Scientist Emeritus at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado. Before moving to Mines he directed the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences at NCAR. His current focus in research is the computation of spatial statistics methods for large data sets and the migration of these algorithms into easy to use R packages. He has coauthored more than 100 research articles and with an h-index of 50. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and a recipient of the Jerry Sacks Award for interdisciplinary research.