Congratulation to Evan Sidrow, the recipient of the Rick White Award for the UBC academic year 2021.
Evan has made important contributions to the applied fields of ecology, developing new methods to analyze high frequency biologging data, with a focus on killer whale kinematic data. This work has helped scientists to identify crucial behaviours such as foraging and to understand the differences in health of the Southern and Northern Resident Killer Whales. He is now developing methodology that will not only be useful for the killer whale project, but also for a broad range of applications in ecology and beyond, for instance, in understanding human behaviour through devices such as FitBit.
Evan has been leading meetings of the cross-disciplinary Animal Movement and Distribution Reading Group for the past few years. In the group, he has had a significant role in fostering new collaborative project and research ideas and supporting ecologists in their use of complex statistical methodology. In return, he has gained a broad understanding of the research questions in animal movement and distribution.
Evan is co-supervised by Marie Auger-Méthé (Assistant Professor, Statistics Department and the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries) and Nancy Heckman (Statistics Professor).
Congratulations, Evan!!
About the Rick White Award
The Rick White Award recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in statistical science through collaboration with investigators in another discipline on a substantial application. The award honours the memory of Rick White, who served the department and the university with his gifts in Applied Statistics.
A two-time UBC alumnus, Rick received his Bachelor of Science with a major in Mathematics in 1990 and his Master of Science in Statistics in 1992. He began his career assisting Professor John Petkau as a consultant for the Statistical Consulting and Research Laboratory, eventually moving up to the role of Managing Director of what is now the Department’s Applied Statistics and Data Science Group. Rick passed away on September 2, 2016, leaving a hole in our department and in our hearts.
To learn more about or to support the Rick White Memorial Fund, see Rick White’s In Memoriam page.