Richard James Boys

6th April 1960 - 5th March 2019

Richard James Boys was born in Leeds in the spring of 1960. His first experience at Newcastle University was as an undergraduate, completing a BSc in Mathematics in 1981. This was followed by an MSc in Statistics and a PhD, awarded in 1985, at the University of Sheffield. Richard returned to Newcastle University later that year after securing a Lectureship in Statistics. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1996 and to Professor of Applied Statistics in 2005, the post he held until his death in March 2019.

Throughout his career, Richard was a committed Bayesian statistician. He thrived on collaborations, both with applied scientists and with fellow methodological researchers, publishing over 100 refereed journal articles, almost all of which were jointly authored. His main areas of research interest were statistical bioinformatics, particularly statistical issues in computational and stochastic systems biology, and inference for partially observed stochastic processes. At the time of his death he was involved in a number of projects covering a range of topics including Gaussian process emulators for stochastic computer models, statistical phylogenetics, Bayesian nonparametrics and prior elicitation. It is likely that several of these projects will be published posthumously.

Richard enjoyed supervising PhD students and mentoring junior academics. Indeed, many statisticians at Newcastle, and elsewhere, credit Richard with helping them to secure a first academic post. Richard also enjoyed travel, particularly around Australia where he had a number of collaborators. This was particularly true at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane,  where he had been Adjunct Professor in Statistics since 2017.

As an active Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, Richard was particularly involved with its North Eastern Local Group, and served on its committee as a regular member, secretary and treasurer, and chair. At national level, he served on the National Programme Committee, as Senior Examiner, on Council, General Applications Section, Research Section, Graduate Training Programme Committee and President Nominating Committee. At the time of his death, he was Joint Editor of Applied Statistics (JRSS C), having previously served two separate terms as an Associate Editor. The final talk of the day will mark the inaugural Boys Lecture to be hosted annually by the Royal Statistical Society North Eastern Local Group.

Richard immensely enjoyed statistics talks and was infamous, locally, for his shrewd post-seminar questions. This workshop will honour his life and work through a programme of talks from the research community in which he took so much pride.

This text was based on a longer obituary for Richard Boys, written by Darren Wilkinson, which appeared in May 2019 in Bernoulli News, Volume 26 (1), pages 12 - 14.