Andrew B. Lawson

Andrew B. Lawson (born Decmeber 4, 1951) is a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in spatial statistics. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics in the division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, College of medicine, Department of Public Health Sciences at Medical University of South Carolina, USA.
==Education==
Andrew completed his graduation with subsidiary subjects of Math, Politics, Geology, and Scottish History from University of Aberdeen, UK in 1973. In 1975, Andrew completed his MSc in Network Analysis and Quantitative Methods from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada on scholarship and a University teaching fellowship. Later on, in 1987, he completed his MPhil from University of Leeds, Uk. Moreover, during his MPhil, he worked as full time research student on Mathematical modelling of Environmental systems. While in 1991, he completed his PhD in spatial statistics from University of St Andrews, UK.
Dr Lawson’s research focus is on Bayesian statistics, Spatial Biostatistics, and Hierarchical multilevel modeling.
==Career==
Andrew Lawson started his career as a senior statistician in 1980. As a Lecturer he started his work in University of Abertay Dundee in 1985. In the same university he was promoted to senior lecturer in 1988. Moreover, in 1998, he moved to the University of Aberdeen and to teach Statistics there, and reached the designation of Reader. He moved to University of South Carolina, Columbia, US, and worked as professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics. Since 2008, he has been a full University Professor of Biostatistics, in Department of Public Health Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina.
==Research Work==
Dr Lawson especially has research interest in the fields of spatial and environmental statistics, while particularly, in spatio-environmental epidemiology. This area revolves around ecological analysis, disease mapping as well as the analysis of clustering of disease. Moreover he has interest in other areas of epidemiology as well, object recognition and directional data from imaging and geo-statistical estimation of different fields with application in geo-sciences, geology and medical science. Dr Lawson has over 180 Journal papers on the subject of spatial statistics, spatial epidemiology and related areas. Furthermore, He is also the author of 10 books in the fields relating to health surveillance and epidemiology. Recent work is Lawson, A.B. et al (eds) (2016) Handbook of Spatial Epidemiology. CRC Press, New York, and in 2018, a 3rd edition of Bayesian Disease Mapping; hierarchical modeling in spatial epidemiology CRC Press. He is also an associate editor in several journals. Andrew is an advisor in risk assessment and disease mapping for WHO (World Health Organization). In the tenure of his last 15 years, Dr Lawson has delivered many short courses in different locations, on Bayesian Disease Mapping, disease clustering and spatial epidemiology.
==Popular Books==
Dr Lawson is the author of 10 books among them” Statistical Methods in Spatial Epidemiology, “Spatial Syndromic Surveillance for Public Health , Disease Mapping with Win BUGS and MLwiN (Statistics in Practice), An Introductory Guide to Disease Mapping, Bayesian Disease Mapping(Interdisciplinary Statistics)”.
He was the author, in 2021, of “Using R for Bayesian Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Health Modeling” which was the part of “Chapman &Hall/CRC The R series”. Andrew worked as an editor of Spatial and syndromic surveillance for public health edited by Andrew B. Lawson, Ken Kleinman and “Disease mapping and risk assessment for public health”.
==Publications==
Dr Lawson has a list of 409 publications some of them are with the joint effort of others.
* Predictors of Developmental Defects of Enamel in the Primary Maxillary Central Incisors using Bayesian Model Selection
* Bayesian Space-time SIR modeling of Covid-19 in two US states during the 2020-2021 pandemic
* Using Bayesian time-stratified case-crossover models to examine associations between air pollution and “asthma seasons” in a low air pollution environment
* GPA-Tree: Statistical Approach for Functional-Annotation-Tree-Guided Prioritization of GWAS Results
* Association between Neighborhood Social Deprivation and Stage at Diagnosis among Breast Cancer Patients in South Carolina
* Author Correction: Modelling and predicting the spatio-temporal spread of COVID-19, associated deaths and impact of key risk factors in England
* Using Bayesian time-stratified case-crossover models to examine associations between air pollution and “asthma seasons” in a low air pollution environment
* Issues in Bayesian Prospective Surveillance of Spatial Health Data
==Other Work==
Dr Lawson recently worked on the research article “Space-time covid-19 Bayesian SIR modeling in South Carolina” with the joint effort of Joanne Kim. He is a chief founding editor of the journal Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Epidemiology.
==Awards and Honors==
* 1980:	Associate Fellow of the IMA (AFIMA)
* 1981:	Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (FSS)
* 1985:	Fellow of the Institute of Statisticians (FIS)
* 1991:	Member of the Bernoulli Society
* 1993:	Chartered Statistician (Royal Statistical Society) (CStat)
* 1997:	International Biometrics Society member
* 1998:	American Statistical Association (ASA) member
* 2010:	Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association
* 2015:	Revalidation of CStat (Royal Statistical Society)
* 2019:	Life Fellow of the American Statistical Association
==References==
Category:1951 births
Category:Professors
Category:Alumni of the University of St Andrews