Kartik Waghmare completed his PhD in statistics in 2023 under the supervision of Professor Victor Panaretos. His research at EPFL, tackled foundational challenges in statistical theory and functional analysis.
The Swiss Statistical Society has been awarding the Johann Heinrich Lambert Award since 2013 to acknowledge the contributions of young statisticians. The Lambert Award includes a certificate and a cash prize of 1,000 Swiss Francs. Kartik Waghmare will receive the Johann Heinrich Lambert Prize from the Swiss Statistical Society, an award that highlights the work of promising young statisticians.
The prize will be presented on Thursday, 6 November 2025, at the Swiss Statistics Conference in Geneva, where he will also deliver a brief talk.
Kartik work during his PhD resolved deep and old open problems, such as the completion of positive definite kernel functions and the formulation of graphical models for Gaussian processes. These advances are already having an impact across theoretical and applied statistics.
“Kartik’s results are nothing short of a breakthrough in a problem that goes back to Carathéodory, more than 100 years ago,” says Professor Panaretos at EPFL. “He started from genuine statistical questions arising in longitudinal studies, which required him to dig deep and produce new results in functional analysis. But he came full circle back to statistics, to operationalise his new mathematics, and give elegant solutions to the original statistical problems.”
Waghmare is currently continuing his research at ETH Zurich.