The Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) awards the Pitman Medal in recognition of outstanding achievement in, and contribution to, the discipline of Statistics.

Professor John Carlin has a PhD in statistics from Harvard University and over 35 years of experience as a research biostatistician, collaborating widely across many areas of clinical and public health research while also pursuing independent methodological research on missing data problems and causal inference, among many others.

For much of his career he was the Director of the Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics Unit at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) in Melbourne.   He has published prolifically, with several hundred publications, many with high numbers of citations; included in these is the famous “Bayesian book” well-known by generations of statistics students.

His leadership was crucial in the creation and maintenance of two very influential entities of high impact in biostatistics in Australia and the world: the Biostatistics Collaboration of Australia and the Victorian Centre for Biostatistics (ViCBiostat). 

All this and more make up a very considerable and highly valuable contribution to the statistical community in Australia and it is with great pleasure that the SSA awards the Pitman Medal to John Carlin.