Professor John Carlin receives Pitman Medal

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Professor John Carlin has been awarded the Pitman Medal for his contribution to the discipline of statistics.

Professor Carlin was presented with the medal by the Statistical Society of Australia in recognition of a career spanning more than 35 years in the field.

Image: Professor John Carlin 

His research remains at the cutting edge of biostatistics, the science of developing and applying statistical methods to problems in the health and medical space. This field is increasingly recognised as fundamental to modern research as it provides a theoretical framework for deriving sound conclusions from data. This is particularly important due to the rapidly increasing technological capacity to collect and manipulate large volumes of data. 

For much of his career Professor Carlin was the Director of the Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit (CEBU) at MCRI. He has produced hundreds of research papers, many highly cited, including the famous “Bayesian book” well-known by generations of statistics students. His leadership was crucial in the creation and maintenance of the Biostatistics Collaboration of Australia and the Victorian Centre for Biostatistics (ViCBiostat). He has also been fundamental in training and fostering the next generation of biostatisticians.

Complementing this work, Professor Carlin has made contributions as a collaborator in numerous areas of child and adolescent health including rotavirus disease, vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, neonatal intensive care, asthma and other allergic diseases, mental health and obesity.