The Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) awards the Pitman Medal (named after E. J. G. Pitman), at most once annually, in recognition of outstanding achievement in, and contribution to, the discipline of Statistics. 

SSA is pleased to announce

Rob J Hyndman FAA FASSA, Professor of Statistics and Head of the Department of Econometrics & Business Statistics at Monash University, 

as the Pitman Medal winner in 2021.

Rob Hyndman is one of the world’s most recognised statisticians and is internationally recognised for cultivating widespread interest around forecasting. He has authored about 200 papers, chapters, or books on statistical topics since 1991. His most important contributions are in the areas of time series forecasting, forecast reconciliation, energy forecasting, and demographic fore- casting. The methodology developed in Hyndman’s research papers is used in many fields including epidemiology, demography, energy management, optometry, meteorology, operations research, pharmacology, environmetrics, tourism, ecology, satellite imaging, and chemistry. Google Scholar calculates more than 29 400 citations of his work (17 900 in the last five years). His H-index is 62.

Rob Hyndman has been Editor of three statistical journals as well as an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Forecasting from 2001–2004 and 2019.

Hyndman was a Director of the International Institute of Forecasters from 2005–2018. He was Secretary of the Victorian branch council of the Statistical Society of Australia for several years in the late 1990s. Also, he was the Victorian representative on the Central Council of the Statistical Society of Australia for some time in the 1990s.

Hyndman is frequently asked to advise the Australian Bureau of Statistics on methodological is- sues, most recently to correct the well-publicised problems they had with unemployment seasonal adjustment in August 2014. He was also a member of the ABS Methodological Advisory Committee from 2010–2018.

He has been on the scaling committee for the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre (overseeing the calculation of the ATAR for all Victorian VCE students) continuously since 1994.

He has been on the ATAR technical group (and its predecessors) for the Australian Conference of Tertiary Admissions Centres (overseeing the calculation of the ATAR for all Australian Year 12 students) continuously since 2003.

He has been on the Indigenous Statistical and Information Advisory Group for the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare since 2017.

Hyndman’s work with the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aging involved reducing the forecast error in the budget for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme from nearly $1 billion per year to less than $50 million per year (out of a budget of $7 billion at the time). His methods continue to be used for forecasting the PBS budget nearly 20 years later.

Hyndman was the founding Director of Consulting for the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University, and founding Director of the Monash University Business and Economic Forecasting Unit. In these roles he has collaborated with more than 100 commercial clients, in Australia, New Zealand, China, USA, India, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.