UBC Statistics PhD student Evan Sidrow won the Best Graduate Oral Presentation Award (Ph.D.) at the Eighth Annual Canadian Statistics Student Conference. This conference is usually held in-person just before the annual Statistical Society of Canada meeting, but this May, it was offered online. Evan’s presentation, Modelling Marine Mammal Sub-dive Behaviour with Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models, stems from joint work with Sarah Fortune and Andrew Trites of the Institute of Oceans and Fisheries, and Marie Auger-Méthé and Nancy Heckman. Evan’s work provides biologists with detailed information about diving behaviour by incorporating fine-scale processes into the larger structure of hierarchical hidden Markov models, all while maintaining computational efficiency.
The work is supported by the Whale Science for Tomorrow initiative, with funding from Fisheries and Oceans Canada and NSERC to support research that will aid the recovery of Southern Resident Killer Whales.
Congratulations, Evan!