A FORMER pupil of Ilkley Grammar School has been announced as the winner of the sixth Statistical Excellence in the Pharmaceutical Industry Award.

Richard Nixon, who is now associate director in the Statistical Methodology and Consulting Group at Novartis in Basel, grew up in Ilkley attending All Saints, Addingham Middle and Ilkley Grammar Schools.

Richard, whose parents are Malcolm and Jennifer Nixon, of Ilkley, obtained a maths degree at Durham University, before going on to Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in Bio statistics.

After a time of research at New Addenbrooks, he has been working in Basel for Novartis Pharmaceutical for the past ten years. He is married to Valda and has a one-year-old daughter, Kyra.

The award, made jointly between the Royal Statistical Society and PSI (Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry), was presented during an awards ceremony at PSI annual conference in Berlin

Richard was nominated for the award by Frank Bretz, a Statistical Methodology group member at Novartis, for work titled ‘Enhancing decision-making in drug development using quantitative approaches’.