Steffen Unkel obtained an MSc in Statistics at the London School of Economics & Political Science. He holds a PhD in Statistics from the Open University in Milton Keynes; his doctoral thesis was entitled 'Factor Analysis of Data Matrices: New Theoretical and Computational Aspects with Applications'. At present he is a member of the Department of Medical Statistics at the University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany. Steffen Unkel is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Statistics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His research interests include the analysis of time-to-event data, multivariate methods and computational statistics.