Professor Kanti Mardia OBE

Profile

Kanti V. Mardia is currently a Senior Research Professor, a position which has been specially created by the University of Leeds after ending in 2000 his position as Chair of Applied Statistics which he had held since 1973. He was also a Visiting Professor at Oxford University from March 2013 to September 2023. From October 2017, he holds the Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship.

Professor Kanti Mardia has received many prestigious honours, including the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society in 2003, and the Wilks Memorial Medal by the American Statistical Society in 2013. 

In 2019,  Mardia received  the Life Achievement Award of the  International Indian Statistical Association  for  recognition of his achievements. He was awarded the Mahatma Gandhi Medal of Honour 2019-20 by the NRI Institute on the occasion of the 150th Birth Anniversary "for his outstanding contributions". He received OneJAIN Life Achievement Award 2021 by the Jain All Party Parliament Group for his work on Science and Jainism.

Professor  Mardia was awarded an OBE(the Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire)  for “Services to Statistical Sciences” in the New Year Honours List of 2023. For  some details see,

https://forstaff.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/7922/new-year-honours-recognition-for-professor-kantimardia#:~:text=Professor%20Kanti%20Mardia%2C%20from%20the,joining%20the%20University%20in%201973. Her Royal Highness Princess Anne performed the Investiture Ceremony for the OBE at Buckingham Palace  on  3rd March 2023

One of his very high profile research works is of saving lives by analysing the shape of the brain: methods developed for shape analysis by him in Leeds, with other collaborators, have been used on brain images to assess the extent of brain damage in people suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). One of the new high impact projects in progress is related to craniofacial surgery for facial deformities such as cleft lip. One measure of success is the ability of the patient to make "normal-looking" facial expression such as a smile. 

Professor Kanti Mardi also contributed towards the establishment of the Centre of Medical Imaging Research (CoMIR) in 1993, the Centre of Statistical Bioinformatics (CoSB) Leeds in 2006 and he was also the founding Vice-President of the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA). He founded and has organised the Leeds Annual Statistics Research workshops (LASR) which have grown since 1973 into international conferences. With the aim of making his vision of LASR broader by encouraging cutting-edge interdisciplinary work between statisticians and other science communities, the Mardia Prize has been created. This prize was inaugurated by the Royal Statistical Society on 7 September 2016 to fund a grant programme supporting events or workshops in emerging interdisciplinary areas.

His research monographs Statistical Shape Analysis, Statistics of Directional Data, Multivariate Analysis and Spatial Analysis are classics.

Research groups and institutes

• Statistics