M. Ataharul Islam is currently a professor at the Department of Applied Statistics, East West University, Bangladesh. He was a formerly professor of statistics at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, King Saud University and the University of Dhaka. He served as a visiting faculty at the University of Hawaii and University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of the Pauline Stitt Award, Western North American Region (WNAR) Biometric Society Award for content and writing, University Grants Commission Award for book and research, and the Ibrahim Memorial Gold Medal for research. He has published more than 100 papers in international journals on various topics, mainly on longitudinal and repeated measures data including multistate and multistage hazards model, statistical modelling, Markov models with covariate dependence, generalized linear models, conditional and joint models for correlated outcomes. He authored a book on Markov models, edited one book jointly and contributed chapters in several books.
Rafiqul I. Chowdhury, a former senior lecturer at the Department of Health Information Administration, Kuwait University, Kuwait, has been involved widely in various research projects as a research collaborator and consultant. He has extensive experience in statistical computing with large data sets, specially, with repeated measures data. He has published more than 60 papers in international journals on statistical computing, repeated measures data and utilization of health care services among others and presented papers in various conferences. He co-authored a book on Markov models and wrote programs and developed packages for marginal, conditional and joint models including multistate Markov and hazards models, bivariate generalized linear models on Poisson, geometric, Bernoulli using SAS and R.