Royal Holloway academic Professor Fionn Murtagh from the Department of Computer Science has just been elected into the prestigious Academia Europaea, an organisation of distinguished European scholars. The Academia Europaea, which was founded in 1988, has members from a wide range of academic fields including engineering, medicine, mathematics, humanities, as well as physical, life and social sciences.

His nominators have declared that “Professor Fionn Murtagh is a leader in the field of pattern and data analysis and classification. He has contributed a variety of mathematically motivated methods to data analysis, often involving massive, high dimensional data sets, and has contributed novel algorithms and evaluated their performance both by using mathematical statistical methods such as Bayesian analysis and by conducting experimental evaluations and operational deployment”.

Despite this achievement, Professor Murtagh stated “I am delighted to be elected into the Academia Europaea. The success is, however, tinged with sadness as my nominator for this was Professor Robin Milner, who died in March 2010 in Cambridge. Robin was without doubt one of the greats of computing and of scholarship”.

Professor Murtagh’s latest book, ‘Sparse Image and Signal Processing – Wavelets, Curvelets, Morphological Diversity’, co-authored with Jean-Luc Starck and Jalal Fadili, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.