David, a graduate of Lancaster's PhD programme in Statistics and Operational Research for Industry (STOR-i), received this year’s award, established in memory of Lancaster's eminent Professor of Operational Research and Operations Management, Brian Kingsman.

David started the STOR-i integrated PhD programme in 2011 after completing his MSc in Operational Research at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his thesis in 2015, and was awarded the STOR-i impact fellowship on the same year.

The title of David's thesis is "Projection Methods for Clustering and Semi-Supervised Classification". Clustering and semi-supervised classification are fundamental problems in machine learning and data mining, and David's work concerns methods for handling high-dimensionality in these problems. The examiners Dr Ludger Evers and Dr Chris Sherlock expressed no hesitation in awarding the PhD, subject to only minor corrections.

David's PhD research has led to three published journal publications, two of which are in the top two machine learning journals: IEEE Transactions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. A further journal paper is under revision. He has also published in the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the top conference on artificial intelligence.

David has accepted a lectureship at the University of Stellenbosch which starts in January.