It is our pleasure to announce the recipient of the HKSS - John Aitchison Prize in Statistics for 2023.

Established in 2022 by the Hong Kong Statistical Society (HKSS), the prize is awarded in honor of the distinguished career and contributions of Professor John Aitchison (1926-2016), Chair Professor of Statistics at the University of Hong Kong between 1976 and 1989 and founder and first President of the HKSS.

The purpose of the prize is to recognize excellence in PhD research, as demonstrated by a research paper, in Statistics or a closely related discipline. The prize is awarded once per year, with its current value set at HK$12,000. While normally only one award is given annually, the Adjudication Panel may recommend multiple awards with the prize amount to be shared by the awardees.

The 2023 recipient of the prize is Dr Jingming Wang (2021 PhD Graduate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) for her paper "Statistical inference for principal components of spiked covariance matrices," published in the Annals of Statistics, 50(2): 1144-1169 (2022). This paper is a joint work with Z.G. Bao, X.C. Ding and K. Wang.

The citation accompanying the award reads as follows: "Theory of spiked covariance matrix has been an important research area in statistics in recent years and has found applications in many fields such as genetics and finance. Dr Wang’s work fills a longtime gap in the literature by obtaining, under very general conditions, the joint limiting distribution of outlying eigenvalues and their associated eigenvectors in the super-critical region. This provides fundamental understanding of high dimensional principal component analysis."

The Adjudication Panel for the 2023 award consists of Professor Wai Keung Li (Chairman) of the Education University of Hong Kong, Professor Ngai Hang Chan of City University of Hong Kong and Professor Ian McKeague of Columbia University.

The Prize is supported by funds provided by the following sponsors: Department of Management Sciences, City University of Hong Kong; Department of Mathematics and Information Technology, the Education University of Hong Kong; Department of Mathematics, Hong Kong Baptist University; Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, the University of Hong Kong; Hang Seng Index Co. Ltd; Hong Kong Statistical Society.

Congratulations once again to Dr. Jingming Wang on this outstanding achievement.