EPFL alumnus Kartik Waghmare wins David Cox Research Prize
Kartik Waghmare. Credit: EPFL
Mathematician Kartik Waghmare has received a major early-career honour from the Royal Statistical Society for his PhD research at EPFL, which tackled foundational challenges in statistical theory and functional analysis.
The David Cox Research Prize is awarded every year by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) to a Fellow at the beginning of their research career, in recognition of an outstanding published contribution to statistical theory or application. The £2,000 prize celebrates work that reflects the innovative and foundational spirit of its namesake, Sir David Cox, one of the most influential statisticians of the 20th century.
The 2025 David Cox Prize has been awarded to Dr Kartik Waghmare, an EPFL alumnus who completed his PhD in statistics in 2023 under the supervision of Professor Victor Panaretos.
The Prize recognizes Waghmare’s exceptional research contributions during his doctoral studies. His work resolved deep and old open problems, such as the completion of positive definite kernel functions and the formulation of graphical models for Gaussian processes. These advances are already having an impact across theoretical and applied statistics.
All three papers cited by the RSS were part of Waghmare's PhD thesis at EPFL, including
- The completion of covariance kernels (Waghmare, and Panaretos, Annals of Statistics, 2022)
- Continuously indexed graphical models (Waghmare and Panaretos, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 2024)
- The positive definite completion problem (Waghmare and Panaretos, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 2024)
In 2024, Waghmare was also awarded the EPFL Mathematics Doctoral Thesis Award.
“Although early in his career, Kartik's work on statistical theory has already had a profound impact, with substantial contributions to deep statistical issues," says Professor Sir John Aston, the President of the RSS. “He is to be congratulated for such a strong body of work.”
“Kartik’s results are nothing short of a breakthrough in a problem that goes back to Carathéodory, more than 100 years ago,” says Professor Panaretos at EPFL. “He started from genuine statistical questions arising in longitudinal studies, which required him to dig deep and produce new results in functional analysis. But he came full circle back to statistics, to operationalise his new mathematics, and give elegant solutions to the original statistical problems.”
Waghmare is currently continuing his research at ETH Zurich.