The Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) has announced that Professor Don L. McLeish has been awarded the 2007 SSC Gold Medal. The Gold Medal is the highest award of the SSC and is awarded to a person who has made substantial contributions to statistics or probability, either in mathematical development or in applied work. The Gold Medal is intended to honour outstanding current leaders in their fields. The formal announcement of this award was made by SSC President Charmaine Dean at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s on the opening day of the 2007 SSC Annual Meeting.
Professor McLeish received his Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal. He followed that with a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. He spent 2 years at York University and 7 years at the University of Alberta before taking up his present position in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo in 1982. He was appointed Full Professor in 1984. During this time Professor McLeish has also been a visiting professor at a number of prestigious universities worldwide.
Professor McLeish has been an outstanding researcher in probability and statistics throughout his career. His early work was on the asymptotic theory of martingales, and in 1975, he originated the idea of mixingales, which has had a great impact on a wide range of applications of probability and statistics. Professor McLeish has also been very active in the area of statistical inference and estimating functions. In 1988 and 1994, he and Professor Christopher Small published two books on this topic which are still widely cited. In recent years, Professor McLeish has been interested in quantitative finance, and in 2005, he published a book on Monte Carlo Methods in Finance which has been very well received.
Professor McLeish has been extremely productive in his research, publishing 38 refereed papers as well as three books and scores of invited presentations. He has also supervised over 50 graduate students. His research has been continuously supported by NSERC since 1974, and he chaired the NSERC Statistical Sciences grant selection committee in 1982-83. In 1983, Professor McLeish was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He served as editor of The Canadian Journal of Statistics from 1985 to 1988 and won The Canadian Journal of Statistics Award for the best paper published in that journal in 2002.
“To Donald Leslie McLeish, for his groundbreaking contributions to the theory of martingales and the development of mixingales, for outstanding contributions to the theory and methodology of estimation, and for exceptional research contributions in probability, statistics and quantitative finance.”