I am currently an PhD Candidate at Carleton University, co-supervised by Drs Adam Smith and Joe Bennett. My research focuses on broad-scale estimates and drivers of detectability in North American landbirds. I am the lead analyst on the NA-POPS project, which is seeking to develop an open-access database of detectability functions to account for biases in bird detectability during on- and off-road point count bird surveys. I use R and Stan to develop multi-species Bayesian hierarchical removal and distance models to generate estimates of a bird species’ availability and detectability, given a number of seasonal and spatial covariates.
In 2020, I completed my BSc in Mathematical Science in the Statistics stream, with an emphasis in Computer Science at the University of Guelph. My honours thesis, supervised by Dr Daniel Gillis, compared typologies of the Deviance Information Criterion (DIC) within the context of generalized spatial Poisson mixture models.
Throughout my undergraduate career, I worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant under the supervision of Dr Gillis and Dr. Shoshanah Jacobs. I developed the Great Lakes Piping Plover Biological Modeling Program, which seeks to create tools to assist in management and recovery of Great Lakes piping plovers (Charadrius melodus circumcinctus). You can read more about an 8-month co-op term here.
I also completed a 4-month co-op term working as a Bird Population Monitoring Analyst at Environment and Climate Change Canada in Summer 2018. In that position, I tested the use of generalized additive mixed-models for improving status and trend estimates of North American breeding birds, and developed the R package bbsBayes.
When I’m not in front of a computer screen writing code, I am exploring the world around me. My main passion lies in ornithology, and my free time is often spent birding. I contribute as much of my birding as I can to citizen science; you can find my eBird profile here (you may need an eBird account)! Birding with people of many other interests has allowed me to expand my own interests into the world of herps, moths, odes, and wildflowers.
While statistics and computer science will be at the forefront of my academic research, I hope to also be able to contribute to natural history research through my amateur field observations.