Margaret Oliver Prize

The Pedometrics Commission of the IUSS is pleased to introduce a new prize, which is intended to recognize up-and-coming talent in pedometrics. The prize is named for Margaret Oliver, in recognition of her outstanding commitment to the promotion and encouragement of pedometricians in the early stages of their careers as well as her overall service to pedometrics.

Margaret Oliver is well-known in the pedometrics community for her many papers, book chapters, standard textbooks, and most recently Basic Steps in Geostatistics: The Variogram and Kriging (M. A. Oliver and R. Webster, 2015, Springer). She has also contributed to the use of numerical methods in many other applications such as childhood cancer, pollen and radon. She made a major contribution to our subject by popularizing it with clear descriptions of its method and applications; for example the early paper in Soil Use & Management (7:206) “How geostatistics can help you”, aimed at non-pedometricians working in applied soil science. She has been a mentor to a number of doctoral students, including some of the first female pedometricians. She taught geostatistics and other numerical methods to undergraduates and postgraduate students at the Universities of Birmingham and Reading.

The prize will be given at each biennial international meeting of the Pedometrics Commission; the first prize will be given in Wageningen (NL) in 2017. The recipient will also receive a voucher for £50 from Wiley, which can be redeemed for digital books.

Requirements and eligibility for the Margaret Oliver prize

Nominees must have:

• received a PhD degree or equivalent no longer than 5 years before the nomination deadline;

• made high-quality contributions to pedometrics, as evidenced by published work, conference presentations, workshops, field guides, etc.

• at the time of the prize be active in pedometrics and with a prospect of so continuing

Pedometrics is broadly defined as the application of mathematics or statistics in soil science.