The Weldon Memorial Prize, also known as the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal, is given yearly by the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

. The prize is to be awarded

without regard to nationality or membership of any University to the person who, in the judgement of the electors, has, in the ten years next preceding the date of the award, published the most noteworthy contribution to the development of mathematical or statistical methods applied to problems in Biology. (Biology shall, for the purposes of this clause, be interpreted as including Zoology, Botany, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and Medical Science.)

It is named in honor of

Walter Frank Raphael Weldon Walter Frank Raphael Weldon FRS (15 March 1860 – 13 April 1906), was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry. He was the joint founding editor of ''Biometrika'', with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Family Weldon was th ...

, former Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University. It was established through the efforts of

Francis Galton Sir Francis Galton, FRS FRAI (; 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), was an English Victorian era polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto- ...

and

Karl Pearson Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university st ...

. Although intended to be given yearly, it has in the past been given less often.

Recipients

* 1911 David Heron''WELDON MEMORIAL PRIZE Past Prize-winners''
* 1912

* 1914 Charles B. Goring * 1920

J. Arthur Harris James Arthur Harris (1880–1930) was a botanist and biometrician, known for the Harris–Benedict equation. He was the head of the department of botany at the University of Minnesota from 1924 to 1930. (He was both preceded and succeeded by C ...

* 1920

Ethel M. Elderton Ethel Mary Elderton (1878–1954) was a British eugenics researcher who worked with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Biography Elderton was born on 31 December 1878 in Fulham, London. Her father, William Alexander Elderton was a private tutor ...

* 1923 Johannes Schmidt * 1926

Major Greenwood Major Greenwood Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS (9 August 1880 – 5 October 1949) was an English epidemiologist and statistician. Biography Major Greenwood junior was born in Shoreditch in East End of London, London's East End, the only chil ...

* 1930

Ronald Aylmer Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who a ...

* 1932 Geoffrey M. Morant * 1935 Egon S. Pearson * 1938

J. B. S. Haldane John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (; 5 November 18921 December 1964), nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS", was a British-Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biolog ...

* 1941

Julia Bell Julia Bell (28 January 1879 – 26 April 1979) was a pioneering English human geneticist.Greta Jones, 'Bell, Julia (1879–1979)', ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 200accessed 10 M ...

* 1944

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS (29 June 1893– 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the fi ...

* 1947

Sewall Wright Sewall Green Wright FRS(For) Honorary FRSE (December 21, 1889March 3, 1988) was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. He was a founder of population genetics alongsi ...

* 1950 Lionel S. Penrose * 1953 Frank Yates * 1956 David J. Finney * 1959 E. B. Ford * 1962

Kenneth Mather Sir Kenneth Mather CBE FRS (22 June 1911 – 20 March 1990) was a British geneticist and botanist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949, and won its Darwin Medal in 1964. He was the second vice chancellor of the University of Sout ...

* 1965

Motoo Kimura (November 13, 1924 – November 13, 1994) was a Japanese biologist best known for introducing the neutral theory of molecular evolution in 1968. He became one of the most influential theoretical population geneticists. He is remembered in geneti ...

* 1969 I. Michael Lerner * 1971 Maurice S. Bartlett * 1974 David Kendall * 1978 Luca Cavalli-Sforza * 1980 Robert May * 1983

David R. Cox Sir David Roxbee Cox (15 July 1924 – 18 January 2022) was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of statistics included introducing logistic regression, the proportional hazards model and the Cox pro ...

* 1986

Tomoko Ohta Tomoko (ともこ, トモコ) is a female Japanese given name. Like many Japanese names, Tomoko can be written using different kanji characters and can mean: * 友子 - "friendly child" * 知子 - "knowing child" * 智子 - "wise child" * 朋子 ...

* 1989 Roy M. Anderson * 1992 George Oster * 1995 Michael P. Hassell * 1996

Martin Nowak Martin Andreas Nowak (born April 7, 1965) is an Austrian-born professor of mathematical biology, at Harvard University since 2003. He is one of the leading researchers in the field that studies the role of cooperation in evolution. Nowak has hel ...

* 1998

John Maynard Smith John Maynard Smith (6 January 1920 – 19 April 2004) was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics und ...

* 2000

Joseph Felsenstein Joseph "Joe" Felsenstein (born May 9, 1942) is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of ''Inferr ...

* 2001

Elizabeth Thompson Elizabeth Southerden Thompson (3 November 1846 – 2 October 1933), later known as Lady Butler, was a British painter who specialised in painting scenes from British military campaigns and battles, including the Crimean War and the Napoleonic ...

* 2002

Warren Ewens Warren John Ewens (born 23 January 1937 in Canberra) is an Australian-born mathematician who has been Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1997. (He also held that position 1972–1977.) He concentrates his research ...

* 2003

Richard Peto Sir Richard Peto (born 14 May 1943) is an English statistician and epidemiologist who is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, England. Education He attended Taunton's School in Southampton and subsequ ...

* 2004

David Sankoff David Sankoff (born December 31, 1942) is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of ...

* 2005

Geoffrey West Geoffrey Brian West (born 15 December 1940) is a British theoretical physicist and former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities. Among other ...

* 2006

Nancy Kopell Nancy Jane Kopell (born November 8, 1942, New York City) is an American mathematician and professor at Boston University. She is co-director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology (CompNet). She organized and directs th ...

* 2007

Brian Charlesworth Brian Charlesworth (born 29 April 1945) is a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of ''Biology Letters''. Since 1997, he has been Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IE ...

* 2008

Peter Donnelly Sir Peter James Donnelly (born 15 May 1959) is an Australian-British mathematician and Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, and the CEO of Genomics PLC. He is a specialist in applied probability and has made contrib ...

* 2009

David Spiegelhalter Sir David John Spiegelhalter (born 16 August 1953) is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the Un ...

* 2010 Russell S. Lande * 2011

David Haussler David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that d ...

* 2012 Gil McVean * 2013

Karl Friston Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB (born 12 July 1959) is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired stati ...

* 2014 John McNamara * 2015 David J. Brenner * 2016 Sarah (Sally) P. Otto * 201
Shripad Tuljapurkar
* 201
Angela McLean
* 201
Stephen W. Pacala
* 202
Simon Myers
* 202
Graham Medley
an
Julia R. Gog
on behalf of th
Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O)

References

Awards and prizes of the University of Oxford British science and technology awards Lists of people associated with the University of Oxford {{sci-award-stub