Sichel Medal
ABOUT THE SICHEL MEDAL
The Herbert Sichel Medal is awarded annually to the member (or members) of the Association who has (have) published the best statistical paper during the previous year.
The following rules will govern the award in 2025:
Papers on theoretical or applied statistics are eligible.
Single- and co-authored papers in which at least one of the principal authors is a member of SASA who is a South African citizen or a South African resident with their primary place of residence and Work in South Africa will be considered.
The papers must have been published (either online or in hard copy) in 2024.
Papers appearing in refereed journals, in fully refereed conference proceedings or as refereed chapters in books are eligible (books, theses or dissertations are not).
Nominations for the award may be made by a member of SASA (who is not an author) or submissions may be made by the author(s). An individual may only submit one paper for the award.
In evaluating the papers for the medal, the panel will use the following set of criteria:
• The impact of the paper in its specific field
• How innovative are the ideas or techniques used in the paper
• The relevance of the problem being addressed
• How well-written is the paper
The decision by SASA on the award of the medal will be final. The membership of the panel is still to be finalised. Any member of the panel who is themselves a nominee will be replaced by someone not nominated for the medal.
All nominations must be made via email to sichel.medal@sastat.org by 30 September 2025.
SICHEL MEDAL WINNERS
2024: L Steyn, T de Wet, B de Beats and S Luca
A Nearest Neighbor Open-Set Classifier based on Excesses of Distance Ratios., Volume 32, Issue 1 of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics in 2023.
2023: S Lee, SG Meintanis & C Pretorius
Monitoring procedures for strict stationarity based on the multivariate characteristic function, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 189(C).
2022: I MacDonald & E Pienaar
Fitting a reversible Markov chain by maximum likelihood: Converting an awkwardly constrained optimization problem to an unconstrained one, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 561.
2021: S Buitendag, J Beirlant & T de Wet
Confidence intervals for extreme Pareto‐type quantiles, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 47(1).
2020: DA Burger, R Schall, R Jacobs & D-G Chen
A generalized Bayesian nonlinear mixed‐effects regression model for zero‐inflated longitudinal count data in tuberculosis trials, Pharmaceutical Statistics, 18(4).
2019: C Pretorius & JWH Swanepoel
On the asymptotic theory of new bootstrap confidence bounds, The Annals of Statistics, 46(1).
2018: A Smit, A Kijko & A Stein
Probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment from incomplete and uncertain historical catalogues with application to tsunamigenic regions in the Pacific Ocean, Pure and Applied Geophysics, 174(8)
2017: L Haines
2016: PJ de Jongh, T de Wet, H Raubenheimer & H Venter
2015: MS Finkelstein & J Vaupel
2014: MM Varughese & EAD Pienaar
2013: F Lombard & CJ Potgieter
2012: I MacDonald, W Zuchinni & R Langrock
2011: AJ van der Merwe & D Chikobvu
2010: M Varughese
2009: LK Debusho & LM Haines
2008: IL MacDonald & W Zucchini
2007: MS Finkelstein & V Esaulova
2006: F Lombard
2005: PJ de Jongh & JH Venter
2004: MS Finkelstein
2003: JWH Swanepoel & FC van Graan
2002: JWH Swanepoel
2000: CF de Beer & JWH Swanepoel
1999: JS Maritz & CJ Lombard
1998: F Lombard
1997: JH Venter & SJ Steel