This is a collaborative project between the University of Kent and the
British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) which was awarded a prestigious
Vice-Chancellor studentship through a Sciences Faculty Competition.
Many bird species breed in the UK and migrate to spend the winter in
Africa. These migration patterns can change from year-to-year (for
example, climate change has been linked to earlier migration) and can
lead to changes in demographic parameters such as phenology, population
or the distribution of species. It is of paramount interest to study
these changes and their effect on wildlife populations to assess the
need for or effect of conservation strategies to support species that
are endangered or in decline. A large data set of bird species that
breed in the UK and spend the winter in Africa has been collected by the
British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) as part of the Constant Effort Sites
(CES) monitoring scheme.
The main supervisor, Dr Eleni Matechou, has demonstrated the importance
of studying migratory wildlife populations using Bayesian nonparametric
models to estimate key demographic parameters. Nonparametric models do
not have a fixed number of parameters and their complexity can adjust to
the data rather than being fixed by a researcher. Bayesian nonparametric
methods provide us with ways to set priors for unknown and potentially
infinite dimensional objects (such as distributions or functions) and
can be estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to obtain
posterior summaries of quantities of interest. The flexibility of these
methods to accurately model complex data in many application areas such
as linguistics, finance and genetics has led to a large and vibrant
community of researchers working on these methods.
In this collaborative interdisciplinary project, you will develop
further these ideas and use novel and sophisticated statistical models,
using Bayesian nonparametric methods, to understand patterns of bird
migration within the UK. The results will be used to inform conservation
management strategies. The supervisory team (Dr Eleni Matechou, Dr
Alison Johnston and Professor Jim Griffin) have experience of Bayesian
nonparametric methods and the modelling of animal populations. The
project deals with issues, eg. climate change and its effect on wildlife
populations, that are of worldwide concern and will involve
state-of-the-art statistical methods which are of interest both in the
academic world and in industry.
Further details are available at http://tiny.cc/bnpsbirds
This award is a Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) and includes PhD
fees and a scholarship of £14,296 per year for 3.5 years. Students
engaged as Graduate Teaching Assistants hold a unique position in the
University in that they are both registered students in receipt of a
scholarship award and employees of the University. Teaching duties may
include: marking, demonstrating, tutoring and outreach. The School
expects that GTAs will do no more than six hours of teaching and
teaching-related duties including preparation per week during term-time.
The deadline for applications is 16th May 2016.
Interviews for this position will be held at the University of Kent on
26th May 2016. If it is not possible to attend in person interviews can
be conducted via Skype.
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