Current Lab Members
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Samantha Broadley
Samantha completed her BSc with a double major in Environmental Science and Physical Geography from Western University. Her interest in wildlife, ecology and conservation led to her enrolment in the Ecological Restoration MSc program. In the summer of 2023, Samantha plans to GPS tag and photograph cormorants and their nesting sites at various locations in the lower mainland area. Seabirds are important indicator species for marine ecosystems and Samantha is hoping to gather more information on the cormorant populations in the Strait of Georgia to help determine possible explanations for their recent declines.
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Rachel Fairfield Checko
Rachel haves always been interested in marine ecosystem rehabilitation and protection. She obtained an honours BSc in marine and freshwater biology at the University of Guelph. Rachel took a short break from my studies to develop laboratory research skills in the Stress Neuroendocrinology Lab and Biodiversity Institute of Ontario. She is now pursuing an MSc in Ecological Restoration. Rachel will be working with SIMRES to research how altered tropic interactions are impacting kelp populations in the Salish Sea, particularly around Saturna Island.
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Fabio Frazao
Fabio has a background in ecology, electronics, and scientific computing. He is generally interested in how technology can be used in the environmental sciences and in 2018 joined the MERIDIAN group at Dalhousie University, where he has been applying artificial intelligence techniques such as deep learning to marine bioacoustics. In 2021, Fabio started his doctoral research on new artificial neural network-based algorithms that incorporate more context into the acoustic detection of marine animals. Using the killer whales of the Salish Sea as a study case, the new algorithms aim to make use of the environmental information that is available to the whales themselves to improve the accuracy of acoustic detections. Real-time processing of underwater sound will help predict where whales are going and, among other applications, reduce ship collision risk.
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April Houweling
April completed her BSc in Biological Sciences with a marine specialization at the University of British Columbia. During her last semester, April studied abroad at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia where she conducted her undergraduate thesis in marine acoustics. April worked in New Zealand for two years before she joined Jasco Applied Sciences (JASCO) as a Project and Field Scientist in 2020. Through JASCO, she has collaborated with the Humans and Algorithms Listening to Orcas (HALLO) team as an expert killer whale acoustic annotator. April is now pursuing a MSc in Statistics, where she will study the parameters of Bigg’s and Southern resident killer whale clicks to explore an ecotype-specific click detector. Her research will contribute to HALLO’s development of a real-time whale forecasting system in the Salish Sea to prevent disturbance to whales.
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Lauren Laturnus
Lauren graduated from SFU in the spring of 2022 with a BSc in environmental science and a concentration in applied biology. She is passionate about the environment and the preservation of species affected by climate change and anthropogenic disturbances, particularly ocean mammals and birds. She is spending the summer of 2022 on Saturna island where she is assisting MSc student Olivia Murphy research the impacts of underwater vessel noise on cetaceans by using both land-based and acoustic observations. She is having a whale of a time!
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Lindsay Lalach
Lindsay graduated from University of Victoria in 2020 with a BSc in Environmental Science and Geography. Since then, Lindsay has worked as a biologist in various roles around British Columbia, exploring her passion for conservation and wildlife biology. Lindsay is starting an MSc this fall in Biological Sciences, where she plans to study the winter ecology of cormorants on the West Coast.
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Teng-Wei Lin
Teng-Wei is a PhD student in Statistics at SFU. He has a background in statistics, hydraulic engineering, and environmental science, and is generally interested in applying statistical and engineering methods to tackle real-world problems. Before pursuing PhD, he completed his MSc in Statistics at SFU, and MSc and BSE in Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering at National Taiwan University. His doctoral research focuses on real-time animal movement forecasting, especially for southern resident killer whales, with stochastic models. He will dive into a variety of datasets, including citizen scientist observations, physical parameters, and acoustic samples from hydrophones, and build an efficient animal movement forecast scheme.
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Janine McNeilly
Janine graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BSc in Environmental Science in 2018. After a few years working in compliance and enforcement, most recently as a park ranger, Janine enrolled in the Ecological Restoration MSc program. She will spend the summer of 2023 studying Southern Resident killer whales in the Salish Sea in collaboration with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Janine’s research goal is to determine if the whales are eating more sablefish to compensate for declining Chinook salmon populations.
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Andrea Mendez-Bye
Andrea is a joint PhD candidate studying at SFU and La Rochelle University. She is presently investigating how climate change is affecting behaviour and foraging efficiency of hooded seals. Before pursuing a PhD, Andrea received a BSc in Biology at California State University Channel Islands,and MSc in Statistical Ecology at St Andrews University. She is highly motivated to understand how climate change plays a role on small scale behaviours and physiological adaptations of a population as well as understanding the larger scale of ecological impact.
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Olivia Murphy
Olivia graduated 2023 from SFU with an MSc in Ecological Restoration program. Her master's research was on marine vessel noise effects on the endangered Southern Resident killer whale (SRKW) in Boundary Pass. Olivia now works on SRKW acoustic identification for the HALLO (Humans and Algorithms Listening for Orcas) project to establish machine learning classification algorithms. Olivia is also working on literature reviews regarding new approaches and technologies we can use to better enforce marine mammal regulations.
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Bruno Padovese
Bruno is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Environmental Science. He has a background in computer science and is generally interested in the intersection of machine learning and environmental sciences. He earned his PhD in computer science from Dalhousie University. His reasearch was in developing deep learning models to aid marine researchers in identifying marine mammals, with a focus on the North Atlantic Right Whale (NARW). Currently, he contributes to the Humans and Algorithms Listening to Orcas (HALLO) project by developping deep learning-based methodologies for identifying killer whale (KW) vocalizations and generating synthetic KW vocalizations. This approach aims to bridge data gaps and refine the accuracy of deep-leaning based marine mammal classifiers and detectors. Ultimately, his work aims to aid marine scientists in better understanding the complex behavioral patterns and communication methods of marine mammals in acoustically rich environments, and in assessing the consequences of human activities.
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Peter Thompson
Peter is a quantitative ecologist with particular interests in animal behavior, movement, and human-wildlife coexistence. He is part of the lab through a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellowship. His project focuses on identifying why southern resident killer whales go where they go, and using this information to predict how their movement and space use patterns may change in response to their changing environment. He will be accomplishing this by integrating a number of data sources, including citizen science datasets and acoustic observations recorded via hydrophone.
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Mikayla Young
Mikayla has always had a love for wildlife and studied biology and environmental science at Trent University. She joined the Ecological Restoration program in 2022. For her thesis, she will be working with SIMRES on Saturna Island researching whales in their habitat of Boundary Pass.