Kantilal Mardia


Kantilal Vardichand "Kanti" Mardia is an Indian statistician specialising in directional statistics, multivariate analysis, geostatistics, statistical bioinformatics and statistical shape analysis. He was born in Sirohi, Rajasthan, India in a Jain family and now resides and works in Leeds. He is known for his series of tests of multivariate normality based measures of multivariate skewness and kurtosis as well as work on the statistical measures of shape.

Life and career

Mardia was educated at the Ismail Yusuf College at the University of Bombay, the University of Poona, the University of Rajasthan and the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. He held academic positions at the Institute of Science, Mumbai and the University of Hull.
Mardia was appointed Professor of Applied Statistics and Head of the Department of Statistics in the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds in 1973. He retired in 2000 with the title Emeritus Professor and is currently Senior Research Professor of Applied Statistics at Leeds. He is also a long-term Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, from March 2013, and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, from 2008.
He was instrumental in founding the Centre of Medical Imaging Research in the University of Leeds where he held the position of joint director. He was the driving force behind the exchange programs between Leeds and other scholarly centres such as the University of Granada, Spain, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. He has written several scholarly books and edited conference proceedings and other special volumes.
In 1973, Mardia founded the University of Leeds Annual Statistics Research Workshops which have run for most years and he has edited all the proceedings. These workshops attract an international audience and focus on applied statistical topics especially those involving shape and images, and more recently, bioinformatics.
In 2003, he was awarded the Guy Medal in Silver by the Royal Statistical Society.
In 2013, he was awarded the Wilks Memorial Award by the American Statistical Association.
In 2019, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Indian Statistical Association.
He is the founding and current Chairman of the Yorkshire Jain Foundation.

Books

The Mardia Prize is awarded by the Royal Statistical Society. This award is given annually/biennially to support interdisciplinary workshops. The aim of these workshops is to bring together statisticians and other science communities who can help in developing new interdisciplinary area and maintain a sustained focus. The first award was inaugurated in 2016 with the second in 2018 and the third in 2019.