Alan E. Gelfand is the James B. Duke Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University. He is a leader in Bayesian spatial modeling and analysis including a successful book in this area with Banerjee and Carlin. Montserrat (Montse) Fuentes, Ph.D., became dean of the Virginia Commonwealth University College of Humanities and Sciences on July 1, 2016. She came to VCU from North Carolina State University, where she served as the head of the Department of Statistics and James M. Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Statistics. She also served as center director for the Research Network for Statistical Methods for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, a research collaborative funded by the National Science Foundation. She received a dual bachelor’s degree in mathematics and music (piano) from the University of Valladolid in Spain and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Chicago. Jennifer A. Hoeting is a Professor of Statistics at Colorado State University, where she has worked since 1994. She received her PhD from the University of Washington. Richard L. Smith is Mark L. Reed III Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Professor of Biostatistics in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From 2010-2017 he was also Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, a Mathematical Sciences Institute supported by the National Science Foundation, and he will continue (through June 2018) as Associate Director of SAMSI. He obtained his PhD from Cornell University and previously held academic positions at Imperial College (London), the University of Surrey (Guildford, England) and Cambridge University. His main research interest is environmental statistics and associated areas of methodological research such as spatial statistics, time series analysis and extreme value theory. He is particularly interested in statistical aspects of climate change research, and in air pollution including its health effects. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and has won the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society, and the Distinguished Achievement Medal of the Section on Statistics and the Environment, American Statistical Association. In 2004 he was the J. Stuart Hunter Lecturer of The International Environmetrics Society (TIES). He is also a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society.