The 2006 recipient of the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada is Christopher A. Field.
Professor Christopher A. Field received his B.Sc. from Dalhousie University and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. At Dalhousie, he was appointed Assistant Professor in 1970 and Professor in 1983.
Professor Field served several times as the Director of Statistics at Dalhousie and the Director of its Consulting Service beginning in 1978. He was President of the Statistical Society of Canada in 1992-1993, and received the Society’s Distinguished Service Award in 2004. He has acted as the Program Chair for two of the Society’s annual meetings and as local arrangements chair in two others. Professor Field is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Professor Field excels as both an applied and theoretical statistician. He is well known for his work in saddlepoint approximations, robustness, model selection, marine ecology and phylogenetics. He is a world-wide leader in the area of small sample asymptotics. He has collaborated with marine biologists developing methods to estimate predator diet from fatty acid signatures. He has been a leading computational scientist at the Atlantic Genome Centre, an acknowledged centre of excellence in environmental microbial genetics.
“To Christopher Arnell Field, for outstanding contributions to robust statistical methods and small sample asymptotics; for important collaborations with scientists in many disciplines; for building an internationally known research group in statistical phylogenetics; for inspired teaching and mentoring of students; and for leadership in the advancement and development of statistical science in Canada.”