On Thursday, March 20, during the Annual Meeting of the VVS-OR, Johannes Schmidt-Hieber won the prestigious Van Dantzig Award of the society.

The Netherlands Society for Statistics and OR (Vereniging voor Statistiek en OR), founded in 1945, tasks itself with fostering collaboration and communication in statistics and OR in the Netherlands. Once every five years, the society hands out the Van Dantzig Award. This award is named after David van Dantzig, the founder of mathematical statistics in the Netherlands. It is awarded once every five years to the most promising young statistician or operations researchers with a link to our country, either by nationality or by affiliation. It was first handed out in 1970 to Willem van Zwet, and this year the 12th edition was held.

The jury, consisting of Aad van der Vaart, Mark van der Wiel, Laura Spierdijk, Onno Boxma and Casper Albers, received a range of nominations of very talented scholars in mathematical statistics, applied statistics and OR. Within this strong competition, one candidate stood out. The Van Dantzig Award 2025 is awarded to prof. Johannes Schmidt-Hieber from University Twente.

Our laureate is editor of several top journals, including the Annals of Statistics and Bernoulli. For his research he received several large grants, including a NWO Vidi and ERC Consolidator grant. Furthermore, he actively contributes to the mathematical statistical community, for instance by organizing the national Van Dantzig Seminar Series for years.

With his contributions to mathematical statistics he has shown that statistics is not something from the past which has now been taken over by machine learning and data analytics, but that statistical thinking can provide the theoretical underpinnings of these new methods. His research is building the theoretical foundations for commonly used algorithms.

He has published a stunning nine papers in the flagship journal Annals of Statistics. Despite the very technical nature of his research – even for statisticians some of his papers are hard to grasp – he holds a keen interest in the applicability of his work. This is one reason behind the fact that one of these nine papers, published in 2020, has already accumulated over 1,000 citations – which is a very exceptional achievement for papers from the field of mathematical statistics.

Besides his activities at the crossroads of AI and mathematical statistics, he is active in various other fields of statistics, such as Bayesian nonparametric inference, stochastic processes and various types of optimisation algorithms.

A common line in his research is that he seems to deliberately go for the questions that everyone seems to ask, but no-one seems able to answer. Multiple times Johannes has delivered an answer to such questions.

At the University Twente, Johannes has rebuilt the statistics department by recruiting a diverse group of talented statisticians and the jury is convinced that in the coming years Johannes and his team will keep on improving statistical science.