Andrew B. Lawson is a professor of biostatistics in the Division of Biostatistics, Department of Public Health Sciences, College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). He is an MUSC eminent scholar and American Statistical Association (ASA) fellow. He is also an advisor in disease mapping and risk assessment for the World Health Organization, the founding editor of the journal Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Epidemiology, and the author of eight books, including the highly regarded Chapman & Hall/CRC book Bayesian Disease Mapping: Hierarchical Modeling in Spatial Epidemiology, Second Edition. He has published more than 150 journal articles on spatial epidemiology, spatial statistics, and related areas. He earned a PhD in spatial statistics from the University of St. Andrews.

Sudipto Banerjee is a professor and chair in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an elected fellow of the ASA, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Statistical Institute. He is also a recipient of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association. He is the author/coauthor of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and two highly regarded Chapman & Hall/CRC books: Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis for Spatial Data, Second Edition and Linear Algebra and Matrix Analysis for Statistics. His research interests include hierarchical modeling and Bayesian inference for spatially referenced data.

Robert Haining retired as a professor of human geography from the University of Cambridge in September 2015. He is the author/coauthor of more than 150 articles and two books. His research focuses on the quantitative analysis of geographical data, including the geography of health, spatial representation, spatial sampling, exploratory data analysis, small-area estimation and hypothesis tes