The Department of Statistics is pleased to be a partner in the newly announced ESRC Doctoral Training Centre at Warwick.  This new funding from ESRC will provide exciting PhD opportunities for students whose interests are in statistical methodology for social-science applications.  The first studentships under this scheme will be available from October 2011, and more details will be announced shortly.  (Departmental contact: David Firth)

A direct upshot of the 2008 CRiSM workshop on composite likelihood methods is a special issue of the major international journal Statistica Sinica, with 14 new peer-reviewed papers on this topic.  The special issue was edited by N Reid (U Toronto), B Lindsay (Penn State U) and K-Y Liang (Johns Hopkins U), and can be found online at

http://www3.stat.sinica.edu.tw/statistica/j21n1/21-1.html

Professor Wilfrid Kendall has been elected as a member of the Council of the London Mathematical Society for 2 years from January 2011.

David J Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS (Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge)