Tilmann Gneiting: 2026 Wald Memorial Award and Lecture

HITS Group Leader Tilmann Gneiting to receive the 2026 Wald Memorial Award and deliver the Wald Lectures at the IMS Annual Meeting in Salzburg

Tilmann Gneiting, head of the Computational Statistics group at HITS and Professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has been bestowed a prestigious recognition: The Wald Memorial Award and Lecture, given by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The IMS describes it as follows: “The Wald Memorial Award and Lecture is an annual award that honors Abraham Wald. The Wald Memorial Award and Lecture should be presented by a person whose contributions have been fundamental to the development of statistics or probability.”

The foundations of the science of forecasting

Tilmann Gneiting serves as head of the Computational Statistics group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and Professor of Computational Statistics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.  Until 2024, he was a member of the KIT Institute of Stochastics, where he continues to teach; at the beginning of 2025 he moved to the newly established KIT Institute of Statistics.  At HITS he held the position of Scientific Director in 2023 and 2024.  Previously, he held academic positions at the University of Washington in Seattle, United States and at Heidelberg University, Germany.  From 2016 to 2018 Tilmann served as Editor-In-Chief for the Annals of Applied Statistics.  In 2011, he received an ERC Advanced Grant in support of his research on probabilistic forecasts, and in 2024 he was awarded the Ulf Grenander Prize in Stochastic Theory and Modeling by the American Mathematical Society.  Tilmann’s research has focused on two main areas, spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, and theory and methodology for forecasting, along with applications, such as in weather prediction.

The talks: Dependence measures and calibration

The Wald Memorial Lectures consist of two talks, to be delivered at the IMS Annual Meeting in Salzburg, Austria, July 6-9, 2026: https://ims2026.github.io/IMS2026/
The first talk, titled “Assessing Monotone Dependence: Area Under the Curve Meets Rank Correlation”, concerns the classical topic of quantifying monotone association between random variables. The second talk, “Hierarchies of Calibration: Classification and Regression”, is on calibration – the statistical consistency between probabilistic forecasts and the respective outcomes. Both talks feature joint work with members of the Computational Statistics group at HITS.

Scientific contact:
Prof. Dr. Tilmann Gneiting
Computational Statistics group, HITS


Media contact:

Angela Michel
Head of Communications
Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS)
E-Mail: angela.michel@h-its.org
www.h-its.org