Bert van der Veen is a postdoctoral researcher in Statistical Ecology at the Mathematics department of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. His research focuses on the development of multivariate statistical models, specifically those focused on data of ecological communities. This includes a wide variety of topics, such as easy-to-use software implementations, occasionally computational statistics, aligning statistical models with the ecological processes under study, and generally helping ecologists to make most out of their (multivariate) data. He has a special fondness for ordination, though less so for the ordination methods that are traditionally used in ecology. As organizer of the summer school he is the main point of contact for questions.

Francis Hui is an Associate Professor in Statistics at The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. His research spans a mixture of methodological, computational, and applied statistics, including longitudinal and correlated data analysis using mixed and/or marginal models, dimension reduction and variable selection. Much of his applications are motivated by joint modeling in community ecology and temporal analysis of drivers for physical and mental well-being. All of his research is complemented by copious amounts of tea drinking and unhealthy amounts of anime watching.

Pekka Korhonen is a recent PhD graduate and a current postdoctoral researcher working on statistics for ecology, at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Jyväskylä. His main research interests are in developing new computational approaches for estimation of latent variable models and better methods for addressing sparsity in multivariate ecological community data -- particularly percent cover or compositional data.

Jenni Niku is a university teacher at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests lie in joint modeling, multivariate methods, latent variable models, and computational statistics, with applications mainly in community ecology, as well as other fields involving multivariate modeling.

Audun Rugstad is a PhD candidate in statistical ecology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. He has a background in quantitative paleoecology from the University of Oslo, and his PhD research is primarily focused on developing better multivariate (i.e. Latent Variable) models for assessing ecological community dynamics through time, particularly in the context of nature restoration. He is also passionate about science communication and -teaching, and bridging the gap between theoretical and empirical ecologists. Outside of the office he mainly enjoys playing tennis, doing amateur photography and making silly songs with his biologist rock band.

Sara is a senior Lecturer at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Her main research interests include non-parametric and robust multivariate methods, statistical signal processing and joint modeling of multivariate data, with a particular focus on applications in microbiology, ecology, sports and health sciences.