Richard John Samworth FRS^[1] (born May 1978) is the Professor of Statistical Science and the Director of the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge,^[2] and a Teaching Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. His main research interests are in nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics. Particular topics include shape-constrained density estimation and other nonparametric function estimation problems, nonparametric classification, clustering and regression, the bootstrap and high-dimensional variable selection problems.

• Rustagi Memorial Lecture (2021), The Ohio State University^[3]
• Fellow, Royal Society (2021 election)^[1]
• The COPSS Presidents' Award 2018^[4]
• IMS Medallion Lecture 2018 ^[5]
• The Adams Prize 2017^[6]
• Fellow, American Statistical Association (2015 election)^[7]
• Philip Leverhulme Prize 2014, Leverhulme Trust^[8]
• Fellow, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2014 election)^[9]
• The Guy Medal in Bronze 2012, Royal Statistical Society^[10]
• The Research Prize 2008, Royal Statistical Society^[11]

• Cannings, Timothy I.; Samworth, Richard J. (2017). "Random-projection ensemble classification". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Statistical Methodology). 79 (4): 959–1035. arXiv:1504.04595. doi:10.1111/rssb.12228.
• Cule, Madeleine; Samworth, Richard; Stewart, Michael (2010). "Maximum likelihood estimation of a multi-dimensional log-concave density". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Statistical Methodology). 72 (5): 545–607. arXiv:0804.3989. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9868.2010.00753.x. S2CID 1524045.
• Fan, J., Samworth, R. and Wu, Y. (2009), Ultrahigh dimensional feature selection: beyond the linear model, Journal of Machine Learning Research, 10, 2013–2038.
• Hall, Peter; Park, Byeong U.; Samworth, Richard J. (2008). "Choice of neighbor order in nearest-neighbor classification". The Annals of Statistics. 36 (5): 2135–2152. arXiv:0810.5276. doi:10.1214/07-AOS537.