Two PhD students from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Sciences (SMSAS) have won prizes for best talks at the International Biometric Conference in Florence.

The conference was attended by several staff and postgraduates from SMSAS. There were four prizes for student talks – students were judged on their slides and the talks themselves. Two of the winners were Chen Yu and Emily Dennis – both Statistics PhD students in the National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE) within SMSAS. Chen’s talk was titled ‘Parameter Redundancy of Mixture Models in Capture Recapture’ and Emily’s was on ‘Spatio-temporal Models for British Butterfly Data’.

Professor of Applied Statistics Byron Morgan said:’This is a remarkable success for NCSE and the School. It’s also timely for the two involved, as it’s their last chance as students! I was at both talks, and they were outstanding.’