Ding-Geng (Din) Chen is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is currently the executive director and professor in biostatistics at the College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, USA. Professor Chen is also the DST-NRF-SAMRC research chair in Biostatistics and an Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Statistics, University of Pretoria, South Africa. He was the Wallace H. Kuralt Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Professor in Biostatistics at the University of Rochester and the Karl E. Peace endowed eminent scholar chair in biostatistics at Georgia Southern University. He is also a senior consultant for biopharmaceuticals and government agencies with extensive expertise in clinical trial biostatistics and public health statistics. Professor Chen has written more than 200 refereed publications and co-authored/co-edited 33 books on clinical trial methodology, meta-analysis, causal-inference, Monte-Carlo simulation-based statistical modeling, big data analytics, and statistical modeling for the public health applications. His research has been funded as PI/Co-PI from NIH R01s and other state and federal government agencies with multi-million dollars.Samuel Manda is a Professor and Head of the Department of Statistics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. He also holds Extraordinary Professorships at the Universities of Stellenbosch and North-West His main research interests concentrate on modern statistical methods for the analysis of survival, multivariate spatial data; and evidence and data combination. He has recently started working on multivariate small area estimation and causal effect estimation. He has also been involved with the analysis of COVID 19 transmission parameters and prediction in sub-Saharan Africa. . He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters in biostatistics methodology and applied sciences. He is a National Research Foundation (South Africa NRF) rated Scientist.Tobias Chirwa is currently the Head of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) School of Public Health (SPH). He is also the current Programme Director for the Sub-Saharan Africa Consortium for Advanced Biostatistics training (SSACAB) and co-leads the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fogarty and WHO/TDR funded Implementation Science/Research program. He has developed and led capacity building initiatives including PhD programs, MSc programs in biostatistics, informatics and implementation science at University of Malawi (UNIMA) and Wits. Tobias has co-authored more than 95 internationally peer-reviewed articles. His methodological applications of interests are in longitudinal and survival data analysis.
