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I am
currently an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow working with
Ray Hilborn on salmon ecology at the School of Aquatic and
Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. Recently, I
completed my PhD on the conservation ecology of sea lice and salmon
in British Columbia under the supervision of
Mark Lewis
(Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Biology at the University of
Alberta) and
John Volpe
(Seafood Ecology Research Group at the University of Victoria). I
was awarded a Governor General's Gold Medal for my PhD dissertation.
My interests lie in the sustainability and conservation of
coastal systems,
particularly as influenced by infectious disease. This entails
understanding marine ecology and evolution, but also how humans benefit from and
modify marine ecosystems. I use mathematical tools in my work by developing
theory and synthesizing datasets to address important policy relevant questions.
Although applied, the research is rooted firmly in ecological theory and
there are many exciting insights into basic natural history. My quantitative
approach involves much fieldwork through sampling, experiments, and observation
in addition to mathematical modeling.
Much of my work focuses on how salmon
aquaculture changes the ecology of a native host-parasite system (sea lice and
salmon) and how this affects the conservation of wild Pacific salmon. The
research is highly collaborative and involves a combination of fieldwork,
experimentation, and modeling. It aims to build a knowledge base of the
fundamental ecology of lice and salmon and understand how salmon farms affect
wild salmon populations. There has been much attention on this work (see
media) and so I have developed public information
summarizing the scientific results (see
public
information) and maintain a page posting public criticisms and my responses
(see criticism and responses).
Funding information on the sea lice and salmon research is located
here. |
