ISBA

ISBA Home News Publications > ISBA business > Prizes & awards DeGroot prize Lindley prize Mitchell prize Savage prize Certificate of appreciation Founders award Bayesian resources > ISBA archives > ISBA Membership >

The Mitchell Prize

The Prize is awarded in recognition of an outstanding paper that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem. The Prize is jointly sponsored by the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science (SBSS) of the ASA, the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA), and the Mitchell Prize Founders' Committee.

Toby J Mitchell

The Mitchell Prize is named after Toby J. Mitchell and was established by his friends and colleagues following his death from leukemia in 1993.

Toby was a Senior Research Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory throughout his career, with leaves of absence spent at the University of Wisconsin and at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Toby won the Snedecor Award in 1978 (with co-author Bruce Turnbull), made incisive contributions to statistics, especially in biometry and engineering applications, and was a marvelous collaborator and an especially thoughtful scientist. Toby was a dedicated Bayesian, hence the focus of the prize.

Eligibility and Application Procedure

To be eligible for the Mitchell Prize a paper must have been published or accepted for publication in a refereed journal or conference proceedings during the two years preceeding the nomination. A paper may be nominated by an author or any member of ISBA or SBSS (joining ISBA is easy). A complete nomination consists of:

An electronic file of the paper being nominated, in .pdf format.
A letter of nomination (also in .pdf format) describing the work's eligibility for the Mitchell Prize, that is, why it is "an outstanding paper that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem."
The names of two evaluators (not the nominator or coauthors) who are willing and able to evaluate credibly the usefulness of the work from the perspective of the applied field addressed in the paper, as distinct from providing comments on its statistical merit.
Contact information for nominee, nominator (if different) and evaluators.

Nominated papers will be evaluated by the Mitchell Award Committee, appointed by the ISBA Prize Committee. Nominations may be submitted on-line here. Questions about the process may be sent to awards@bayesian.org.

Winners of the Mitchell Prize

2008 - Hui Jin and Donald Rubin
Principal Stratification for Causal Inference With Extended Partial Compliance (JASA 103(481), 2008, 101-111).
2007 - Tian Zheng, Matthew J. Salganik and Andrew Gelman
How Many People Do You Know in Prison? Using Overdispersion in Count Data to Estimate Social Structure in Networks (JASA 101, June 2006, 409-423).
2006 - Ben Redelings and Marc Suchard
Joint Bayesian estimation of alignment and phylogeny (Systematic Biology 54: 401-418).
2003 - Jeff Morris, Marina Vannucci, Phil Brown and Ray Carroll
Wavelet-Based Nonparametric Modeling of Hierarchical Function in Colon Carcinogenesis (with discussion) (JASA 98: 573-597).
2002 - Jonathan K. Pritchard, Matthew Stephens & Peter Donnelly
Inference of Population Structure Using Multilocus Genotype Data (Genetics 155: 945-959).
2001 - Keisuke Hirano, Guido Imbens, Donald Rubin and Xiao-Hua Zhou
Assessing the effect of an influenza vaccine in an encouragement design (Biostatistics 1(1): 69-88).
2000 - Jun Liu, Andrew Neuwald and Chip Lawrence
Markovian structures in biological sequence alignments (JASA 94: 1-15).
1999 - Alan Montgomery and Peter Rossi
Estimating price elasticities with theory-based priors (J Marketing Research 36(4): 413-423).
1997 - Mike West
Studies of neurological transmission analysis using hierarchical Bayesian mixture models. Published as Hierarchical mixture models in neurological transmission analysis (JASA 92: 587-606).
1994 - Mike West
Some statistical issues in Palaeoclimatology (with discussion). In Bayesian Statistics 5 (eds: J Berger et al.), Oxford University Press.