Professor Tengyao Wang among Philip Leverhulme Prize 2026 winners

LSE Department of Statistics' Professor Tengyao Wang has been awarded one of the prestigious 2026 prizes by the Leverhulme Trust.

The prizes recognise and celebrate the achievements of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future careers are exceptionally promising.

Each of the prize winners receives £100,000 which can be used to advance their research.

Chosen from over 400 nominations, the Trust offered five prizes in each of the following subject areas: Biological Sciences, History, Law, Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy and Theology, and Sociology and Social Policy.

Tengyao was recognised for his work on high-dimensional statistics and machine learning: structured signal estimation, robust inference, and change detection amid complex nuisance variation.

Tengyao commented: “I’m delighted to receive a Philip Leverhulme Prize and very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for its support. This award will support my research into developing new statistical methods that can reliably extract signals of interest from complex data, even in the presence of high-dimensional or complex nuisance influences that cannot themselves be consistently estimated. My aim is to develop robust statistical machine learning methods that deliver trustworthy results, even when the underlying modelling assumptions are weak or inaccurate.”

To find out more about the Philip Leverhulme Prize please visit their website.