Andrew B. Lawson is a professor of biostatistics and eminent scholar in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. He is an ASA fellow and an advisor in disease mapping and risk assessment for the World Health Organization. Dr. Lawson has published over 100 journal papers and eight books and is the founding editor of Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology. He received a PhD in spatial statistics from the University of St. Andrews. His research interests include the analysis of clustered disease maps, spatial and spatio-temporal disease surveillance, nutritional measurement error, and Bayesian latent variable and SEM modeling.