Foremost I would like to thank my wife Fridah for being so great. I thank her also for the strong support and friendship throughout the years of study, when no end was in sight. Its done! I thank my supervisor, Tom Smith, for sharing his vast knowledge and experience with me, and for always being supportive of the project, even in times of doubt. And for making jokes about frogs. I thank all the members of the "Biostatistics and Computational Sciences" unit of the Swiss TPH, for their

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... and for interesting discussions, especially Nakul Chitnis for teaching me mathematics and some french on a bike ride through New Orleans after midnight with the great Joshua Yukich, Konstantina Boutsika for remembering all the birthdays, Aurelio Di Pasquale for the wonderful time in Palermo,