Research Fellowship Award Success
A Reader in Statistics has been awarded a prestigious Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Fellowship to support his pioneering research as part of the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) and Mathematics.
Dr David Woods
was awarded the Fellowship for five years to research new methods for designing experiments to enable the effective selection and estimation of the complex models needed to describe emerging scientific and industrial systems and processes.
He will be working on the research in conjunction with project partners GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).
Dave said: “I am delighted and honoured to receive this prestigious Fellowship. It provides an exciting opportunity to develop new methodological research in statistics and ensure its impact on important scientific problems.”
Design of experiments looks at selecting which combinations of controllable factors should be used to make best use of resources and meet the aims of the study. The objectives of an experiment are usually encapsulated in a statistical model and this model can be crucially affected by the choice of experiments settings.
Dave’s research will investigate methods for three challenges:
- experiments with a complex and unknown relationship between the factors and measured response
- experiments where the collected data is in the form of curves and surfaces
- experiments to understand physically derived theories and hypotheses
The methods will have wide impact across a range of sciences and industry where such experiments are required and where there are usually no available designs tailored to both the aims of the experiment and the methods used in data analysis.