Simon Bonner (Principal Investigator, CV)

Simon completed his PhD in statistics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, and then spent two years as a post-doc at the University of British Columbia. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Kentucky between January 2011 and June 2015. Currently, he holds a joint appointment as an Associate Professor of Environmetrics in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences and Departments of Biology at the University of Western Ontario.

Simon’s research interests lie in the fields of ecological statistics, Bayesian inference, and Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Most of his work has focused on developing models for the analysis of complex mark-recapture data. Particular problems he has worked on include modelling the effects of time-dependent, individual covariates, accounting for misidentification in mark-recapture experiments, and analyzing “big” mark-recapture data sets.

PhD Students

Jonathan is an undergraduate student at Western University in the Honours Specialization in Statistics program. He is completing an NSERC-USRA project over the summer with the lab. His project involves modelling the spatial occupancy of invasive species using reaction-diffusion equations and builds on his undergraduate thesis research. 

He is working on applying this approach to occupancy data of the Eurasian collared dove, collected by Project FeederWatch, in order to better understand the role that various environmental variables play in their occupancy dynamics. Additionally, he is developing a Julia library which will provide an accessible and flexible framework for others interested in this modelling methodology. He is excited to share the results of this work with the statistical ecology community as well as to further explore its generalizations and other possible applications. 

Xianglong is an undergraduate student majoring in Applied Statistics and Psychology. I am currently working on a project under the supervision of Dr. Simon Bonner and Dr. Joern Diedrichsen, which aims to estimate correlations between patterns of brain activity through Bayesian inference methods. My academic interest is in the application of statistical analysis to psychological research, with a focus on how quantitative methods can be applied to understand cognitive processes. I intend to pursue higher education and am currently applying for a Masters in Statistics in the UK & Australia.

Tito completed her Honours Specialization in Actuarial Science at Western University in 2023.  Her honours research thesis focused on conducting a simulation study in order to investigate the effect of identification errors on estimates of abundance for bird populations. She is currently working as a pre-graduate student to extend this research by developing a statistical test which will detect when misidentification occurs in mark-recapture studies.

Tommy visited Western and joined Dr. Bonner’s research group to work on a collaborative project with Dr. Bonner and Dr. Danielle Ethier, a population scientist at Birds Canada. The project applied methods from functional data analysis to cluster smooth GAM curves of trend estimates to see if increasing/decreasing species of birds share similar features. 

Tommy is interested in the use of machine learning text classification and prediction algorithms to help understand human behaviour behind the wildlife trade. He is also interested in randomized response sensitive survey models which can be used to gather estimates on sensitive, and perhaps illegal behaviours. Currently, he is working on creating framework general which categorizes all possible randomized response survey designs and can be used to create novel surveys. 

Braedan graduated with a BSc Hon. in Statistics at the University of Saskatchewan and is currently an MSc student in the department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at the University of Western Ontario.

Braedan is still testing the waters to find where his core statistical interests lie, but for now he is letting the applications of statistics lead the way. He is currently in the early stages of a project regarding the quantification of lipids using mass spectrometry data.

Braedan currently works as a Mathematical Statistician with Statistics Canada.

Yiran graduate from Western with an Honours Double Major in Biology at Computer Science in 2022. In her final year, she completed an honours research project developing new methodology to model the range expansion of invasive species, focussing on the North American invasion of the Eurasian Collared Dove. Yiran also completed an NSERC-USRA with the lab in the summer of 2022.

Yiran is currently completing her MSc in Molecular Genetics at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

Wei Zhang (Post-Doctoral Fellow 2017-2019)

Wei is a Lecturer in the School of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Glasgow.

Wei joined the lab in December 2017, as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at Western University. Before moving to Canada, Wei completed his PhD in statistics at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. He also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Wei’s work has focused on probability density approximation techniques and their applications for maximum likelihood estimation in mark-recapture and population genetics models. Currently, he is trying to extend the methods to more complicated models in mark-recapture. In the near future, Wei will also dabble in Bayesian inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods in statistical ecology.

Patrick Mahon (NSERC USRA 2019)

Patrick is completing his BSc in Biology and Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario. He joined the lab as an NSERC USRA student in 2019 and worked developing Bayesian models for analysing data on bird activities collected from the Motus project.

Philip Choi (NSERC USRA 2019)

Patrick is completing his BSc in Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario. He joined the lab as an NSERC USRA student in 2019 and worked on application of machine learning to ecological data using the TensorFlow package for Python.

Siobhan Schenk (BSc 2018)

Siobhan is currently a MSc Student in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at McGill University. Siobhan complete  her Honours Specialization in Biology at Western in 2018. She joined the lab during the summer of 2016 and has worked on various projects that used RFID tags and nano-radio tags to describe bird movement. Siobhan is interested in using mathematical models to describe complex problems in all aspects of biology.

Amanda Ellis (PhD 2018)

Amanda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Eastern Kentucky University.

Amanda is a graduate of the Department of Statistics at the University of Kentucky and defended her PhD titled “Accounting for Matching Uncertainty in Photographic Identification Studies of Wild Animals” in December 2017. In her thesis, Amanda studied methods to improve photo-based mark-recapture by allowing for uncertainty in the matches and incorporating methods from record linkage. The full text of her dissertation will be available online shortly.

Amanda is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Eastern Kentucky University.

Amanda enjoys coding and is the current maintainer and co-author of the R-package npmv. This package performs nonparametric inference for the comparison of multivariate data samples and has been used in the analysis of neurological studies.

Woodrow Burchett (PhD 2017)

Woody is a Senior Manager of Biostatistics at Pfizer Inc.

Woody successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Improving the Computational Efficiency in Bayesian Fitting of Cormack-Jolly-Seber Models with Individual, Continuous, Time-Varying Covariates ” in May of 2017.  The full text of his thesis is available in the University of Kentucky digital archives. Woody is also a co-author of the R packages npmv and visreg and is currently working as a statistician with Pfizer pharmaceuticals in New London, Connecticut.

Ben Augustine (MSc 2014)

Ben is a Postdoctoral-fellow in the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University.

Ben is a locally extirpated member of the Bonner lab, having dispersed back to his native habitat in the mountains of southwest Virginia. He received his Bachelors degree in Wildlife Science from Virginia Tech and Masters degrees in Forestry and Mathematical Statistics from the University of Kentucky.

Ben is currently working on extending mark recapture models for hair snare experiments where there may be a behavioral response to capture, but not all hair samples produce an individual identification. In these cases, it is no longer known with certainty which captures were first captures and which were subsequent captures where previously-captured animals will have a different capture probability. However, this information can be recovered by modeling the capture, hair deposition, subsampling, and DNA amplification processes.

Ben enjoys working at the interface between Ecological Statisticians and applied Wildlife Biologists and has several previous and ongoing collaborations serving this role. He has collaborated on projects studying a diverse array of species including black bear, elk, desert tortoise, northern spotted owls, and Florida panthers.

Gabrielle Miles (MSc 2012)

Gabby is a Senior Biostatistician with Roche Pharmaceuticals.

Gabby completed her Masters degree in Mathematical Statistics at the University of Kentucky and earned her undergraduate degree in Applied Math and Statistics from Radford University. She currently works as a Senior Biostatistician at Roche Diagnostics in Indianapolis, IN.

As a graduate student at UK, Gabby was interested in the applications of statistics for ecology and participated in research on non-timber forest products. She collaborated on a project modeling the relationship between below ground and above ground biomass of black cohosh in which a linear mixed effects model was developed to predict root mass based on simple above ground measurements.

Check out this article about Gabby on the University of Kentucky’s website.