Dr Lawson is Professor of Biostatistics in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Department of Public Health Sciences, College of Medicine (MUSC), and an MUSC Distinguished Professor and ASA Fellow. He was previously a Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of South Carolina, SC. He completed his PhD in Spatial Statistics from the University of St. Andrews, UK. Dr Lawson has published over 175 journal papers on the subjects of spatial epidemiology, spatial statistics, and related domains. In addition to a number of book chapters, he is the author of 10 books in areas related to spatial epidemiology and health surveillance. Two of his recent books include Lawson, A.B. et al. (eds) (2016), 'Handbook of Spatial Epidemiology', CRC Press, New York, and the 2018 third edition of 'Bayesian Disease Mapping: Hierarchical Modeling in Spatial Epidemiology,' CRC Press. He has served as associate editors on a variety of journals. Moreover, he is an advisor in disease mapping and risk assessment for the World Health Organization (WHO), and the founding editor of the Elsevier journal Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology. Additionally, Dr Lawson has delivered many short courses in different locations over the last 15 years on Bayesian Disease Mapping with OpenBUGS and INLA, and Nimble, Spatial Epidemiology, and Disease Clustering and Surveillance.