This Award recognises an outstanding level of influence in the application of an existing statistical practice, or an innovation, that has strengthened the quality and efficiency of investigations in the pharmaceutical industry.

The standard of the entries for the 2015 Award was again high, and for the first time in its five-year history, the Award was given to two joint winners.

Also for the first time, the Award Ceremony was held at the PSI Annual Conference. This is something that will continue, as we want the winners of the Award to be acknowledged by their peers in the industry and to showcase the influential contributions statisticians make to all stages of drug development and beyond.

Another first was also achieved in that the winners were teams rather than individuals.

The winning teams were, in no particular order,

• The Pfizer team led by Kat Gore for “the development and global implementation of a tool that improves the robustness of preclinical research within a major pharmaceutical company”
• The GSK team led by Nick Best for “the implementation of formal Bayesian prior elicitationmethods throughout all stages of drug development at GSK and using these priors in making Go/No-Go design decisions”.

Congratulations to these worthy winners.

The Awards were presented by Roeland Beerten, RSS Director of Professional and Public Affairs, and Byron Jones, on behalf of the PSI Board of Directors.

 [See picture - from left to right: Byron Jones (Novartis), Kat Gore (Pfizer), Nicky Best (GSK), Roeland Beerten (RSS)]

The Pfizer team was nominated by Phil Woodward, VP of Statistics at Pfizer,  who said  'The tool promotes easy-to-follow but absolutely essential experimental design strategies and represents the distilled experience of the provision of over three decades of statistical support to laboratory scientists',

The GSK team was nominated by Sara Hughes, who said  ‘We believe that the introduction of elicitation and probability-based portfolio decision-making has shifted GSK’s drug development paradigm for the better and has shifted our organisation from frequentism to Bayesianism, largely without mentioning the “B” word’.

So, if you are a senior manager, please think of nominating an individual or a team for the 2016 Award. It will be good for those nominated, good for your company and good for Statistics in the pharmaceutical industry. The nominations will be accepted from about mid-February in 2016 and details and nomination forms can be obtained from the RSS website. [ http://www.rss.org.uk ]

Byron Jones
Novartis