My research interests include: Statistical methods for estimating wildlife population parameters, including estimation of abundance, distribution and trends, from survey data. Distance Sampling, Spatially Explicit Mark-Recapture, other Mark-Recapture and Removal methods, Sampling Theory and Spatial Modelling methods. My home page is here.

My tertiary education was at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (BSc, MSc, PhD) before taking up a post at the University of St Andrews in 2003.

My PhD research was under Assoc. Prof. Brian McArdle and concluded in 2006. This was primarily about the inclusion of spline based models in multivariate analysis, but necessarily included computer intensive simulation work and methods usually under the banner of data mining. The methods were directed towards ecological data, but are widely applicable.

I am currently a course co-ordinator for our new MSc programme in Applied Statistics and Data Mining. This course is intended for students with a varied undergraduate background in statistics but are seeking to work in commercial data analysis. I have directorship on two private consulting companies and am very interested in linking University skills to commercial applications. It is my experience that the most interesting research avenues spring from commercial problems.

My research interests focus on method development for applied problems - these are varied:

• Simulation-based impact assessment for complex scenarios e.g. the impacts of low frequency sonars.
• Smoothing methods for complex areas e.g. 2D smoothing of fauna densities around coastlines using heuristic algorithms.
• Splines in almost anything: mixed models (e.g. forestry growth models), functional analysis (e.g. measuring similarity of complex surfaces), multivariate analyses (e.g. nonlinear redundancy analyses), marketing applications (e.g. Brand Equity and Customer Value modelling).

Research group: Sea Mammal Research Unit

Research fellows:

Dr Rob Williams (EU Marie Curie); Dr Christian Ramp (Fisheries and Oceans, Canada); Dr Debbie Russell (DECC)

Research students:

Monica Arso; Erin Ashe; Aaron Banks; Inez Campbell; Diane Claridge; Salomé Dussán-Duque; Sanna Kuningas; Antonella Servidio; Lindsay Wilson; Heather Anderson (second supervisor); Marina Costa (second supervisor)

Professional Representation:

Member: International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee. Member: IUCN Cetacean Specialist Group and Cetacean Red List Authority. Associate Editor: Marine Mammal Science; Journal of Cetacean Research & Management

Estimating the abundance of whales using information from sparse arrays of seabed-mounted hydrophones

Biodiversity monitoring and measurement, climate change, Bayesian state-space metapopulation modelling

Population and Conservation Biology : Effects of individual variation and spatial structure on the population dynamics, genetics and epidemiology of vertebrates, particularly marine mammals. Interactions between anthropogenic activities and ecosystem function.

Research groups:

CREEM : http://creem2.st-andrews.ac.uk/

NERC Sea Mammal Research Unit

* spatial statistics

* statistical methods for spatial and spacio-temporal data, especially spatial point process modelling

* functional data analysis

* statistical modelling of ecological communities especially for biodiversity

School Positions
Chandos Professor of Physiology (1997-present)
Chairman, Scottish Oceans Institute Staff Council (2009 – present)
Director, Gatty Marine Laboratory (1985-2008)
Director of Research, School of Biology (2003-6)
Member, School of Biology Management Group (2000-2006)
Head of School: (Biology & Preclinical Medicine, 1987-1992; Environmental & Evolutionary Biology, 1997-1999)

External Positions
Steering Committee Member of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC) – an ESFRI Research Infrastructure in the preparatory phase (2011-2014)
Steering Committee Member of LIFECYCLE an EU-funded FP7 Integrated Research Project (2009-2013)
Vice-President (2005-2007) and President (2007-2009) Society for Experimental Biology
Member of the Natural Environment Research Council & Chairman, Marine Science & Technology Board (1995-2000)
Adjunct Professor, University of Nordland, Norway (2002-2011)

Honours
Elected Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh 1987
Awarded Scientific Medal Zoological Society of London 1984

Research Group
Dr Vera Vieira-Johnston (Honorary Research Fellow)
Dr Daniel J. Macqueen (MASTS Research Fellow)
Dr Daniel Garcia de la serrana (EU-funded)
Dr Thomas Ashton (BBSRC-funded)
Clara Coll-Llado, PhD student/academic apprentice (50% with Dr David Ferrier)

Collaborators
Professor Shugo Watabe, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tokyo 113-8657, Japan
Dr Bjarni K. Kristjánsson, Holar University College, Iceland
Dr Robert H. Devlin, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, West Vancouver, Canada
Professor Jorge Fernandes, University of Nordland, Norway
Industrial Partners
Young’s Seafood, SalmoBreed A/S, BioMar, Ewos Innovation

My research focuses on latent-state models (including hidden Markov-type models, state-space models and Markov-modulated Poisson processes) and applications of such models in ecology (e.g., distance sampling, movement modelling, mark-recapture studies). For more details about my work, please see my personal home page.

Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Beverton Medal (FSBI) 2006
Member of RAE 2008 sub-panel 14 (biological sciences)
Editor, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B
Board of Reviewing Editors, Science
Council member, Marine Biological association
Royal Society/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow 2002-2003
Member of British Antarctic Survey Integrated Programme Review Committee 2001-2006
Member of Awards Committee, Zoological Society of London
Member of the Editorial Board of Proceedings to the Royal Society, Series B 1998-2008
Member of the Royal Society Working Party on Biodiversity Measurement 2002-2003

Research Group:

Dr. Maria Dornelas (FCT)
Dr Alejandra Valero (Leverhulme Trust)
Dr James Orpwood (NERC)
Dr Anuradha Bhat (Royal Society India Fellow)

Research Students:

Ms Amy Deacon (NERC) , Mr Miguel Barbosa (FCT)

Funded collaborations:

University of the West Indies, Trinidad
Mamiraua Sustainable Development Institute, Brazil
University of Cardiff
University of Leeds
Freshwater Research Laboratory, Pitlochry

PhD Thesis: Statistical developments for understanding anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems

Current work: Expanding the suite of distance sampling analysis option within the software "Distance" to deal with complexities in marine mammal line transect surveys.

(University of Glasgow)

Member, Natural Environment Research Council, 2007-present

Outlook Editor, Evolution, 2006-present

Member, DEFRA Science Advisory Council, 2004-present

Trustee, St Andrews Botanic Garden Education Trust, 2005-present

Editorial Board, Heredity, 2000-present

Member, NERC Steering Committee on Environmental Genomics, 2000-present

Research Interests

Plant evolutionary biology, genealogical reconstruction and analysis (likelihood-based paternity and parentage analysis), quantitative genetics, sexual dimorphism, linkages between molecular variation and phenotypic evolution, ecological and genetic bases for population differentiation and speciation, conservation biology and biodiversity, risk assessment of gene flow and its consequences in genetically modified organisms, public understanding of science.

Research Group

Ms Malin Rivers (NERC-CASE PhD student)

Chris Mcowen (BBSRC-CASE PhD student)

Current Projects

BBSRC/Kew Enterprises.  Integrating phylogenetic and trait diversity into conservation management of monocot species.  BBSRC CASE studentship for Chris Mcowen

Leverhulme Research Fellowship.  “Matching population biology to policy need in conservation of biodiversity.”  [June 2007 – September 2008]

NERC/Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK . of Delonix in Madagascar.  NERC CASE studentship for Malin Rivers

NERC Environmental Genomics. “Genomic analysis of the relationship between repetitive DNA and phenotypic evolution.” [January 2002 - December 2004]

Science & Society

2001 Evolution, Science, and Society

1994 Leaping into the Future with Evolutionary Biology
 

My undergraduate studies took place at the Mathematics department of the University of Ioannina, Greece.

My PhD thesis was supervised by Professor Anthony O’Hagan at the universities of Nottingham and Sheffield, UK. Its subject was the development of Bayesian models for correlated binary variables and assessments of varying quality. Related to my PhD is research and consultancy work I have done on asset management, elicitation and uncertainty evaluation

Currently, my main research interests lie in Bayesian Statistics, Biostatistics and genetics. Specifically, I am working on model selection and variable selection for highly structured data. I am also developing Bayesian dimensionality reduction models for the analysis of epidemiological and genetic data from large cohort studies.

Research interests in brief: Bayesian statistics, model selection, variable selection, dimensionality reduction, Biostatistics, genetics, elicitation, uncertainty evaluation.

General Information

I am interested in the marine ecosystem and species at the interface between the marine and terrestrial environments, namely seals and seabirds which are dependent on the marine ecosystem for food but on the terrestrial environment for breeding.  I am particularly interested in interactions on various levels: among different taxa, between species and humans, and between species and their changing environment.

Research

• Using a mixture of Bayesian and frequentist methods to analyse harbour and grey seal telemetry data to answer both pure and applied research questions.
• Modelling interactions between seals and fisheries in a spatial context, using state space models.
• Modelling the effect of climate variation on British seabirds (PhD, University of Leeds).

Research: Use of spatially adaptive smoothing (SALSA methods) and geodesic distance (CReSS method) for modelling species distributions.  Of particular interest is analysis of environmental impact assessment survey data.

PhD: Predicting the distribution of marine organisms in spatially complex regions.

Research Interests:

Spatially adaptive smoothing
Splines
Two Dimensional smoothing, in particular in areas of complex topography.
Radial basis functions

Talks:

ECS Talk 2013

My research is in computational biology, specifically, in the analysis of complex biological networks. I develop and use functional network inference algorithms to reveal the functional interactions among elements of a network. I study gene regulatory, neural information flow, and ecological networks.

For more information, please visit my research pages: Complex Biological Neworks.

Positions

2005-present: Academic Fellow, School of Biology, University of St Andrews
2001-2005: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Neurobiology, Duke University Medical Center

Education

2001 PhD, Biology, Indiana University
1995 BS, Biology, College of William and Mary

My interests are in the processes that drive changes in animal populations, especially in marine ecosystems. Foraging success and trophic interactions have important consequences for populations of ‘top’ marine predators e.g. seabirds and marine mammals, for their prey, and for fisheries. I also work on the implications of bycatch for predators, and the consequences of limiting bycatch for fisheries. Methods used and under development include: modelling the spatial distributions of predators and prey; the analysis of mark-recapture data; modelling trophic interactions; Bayesian methods including state-space (or hidden process) models.

Multi-species integrated population models.

My main research areas are: (1) Development of methods and software for estimating the size, density and distribution of wild animal and plant populations. I mostly work on a group of related methods called distance sampling. (2) Use of computer intensive methods to fit and compare stochastic models of wildlife population dynamics. Here, I mostly work on algorithms called particle filters. For more details about my work, including links to my publications, please see my personal home page.

Integrated Stopover Models for Mark-Recapture Data