I grew up a sixth generation settler (Polish-English on my mum's side, Scottish/Jewish German on my dad's side) on the unceded lands and waters of the Katzie, Semiahmoo, Kwantlen, Kwikwetlam, Qayqayt, and Tsawassen peoples. I now gratefully live and work on the unceded traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose traditional territory the University of Victoria stands, and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. My intention is to support and uplift Indigenous students through initiatives such as the formation of the UVic AISES chapter and the formation of the WNAR Indigenous student travel award.
I am an ecological statistician at the University of Victoria with a research focus in mark-recapture methods and applications. In particular I am interested in tag loss and how it can be incorporated into models directly. I work on real world problems, mainly pertaining to fishery studies, often involving big data problems.
My major focus of research is mark-recapture methodology and applications in both fisheries and public health. Mark-recapture experiments are used widely by fisheries biologists, wildlife managers and ecologists as a method of estimating population numbers, survival, recruitment, and migration rates.
Currently, I am working on estimating the number of hidden COVID-19 cases in British Columbia with support from CANSSI and the Micheal Smith Foundation for Health Research in collaboration with the Victoria Hospitals Foundation. I am also a team member working on Statistical Methods for Managing Emerging Infectious Diseases funded by NSERC EIDM that will continue and expand on my COVID-19 research. Check out an interview I did here with CBC Prince George. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I have been involved in several projects that investigated needle sharing behaviour of people who use injection drugs in Victoria, B.C. and in estimating the number of injection drug users in Victoria. I was involved in the FOCOS project, studying ocean reflectance data obtained by citizen scientists. I am a team member of VADA (Visualization and Data Analytics) where my students are using wildlife modelling methods to estimate the homeless population of Vancouver Island.
I am a lead investigator for a CANSSI Collaborative Research Team "Addressing spatial and computational issues in integrated analysis of modern ecological data" with Simon Bonner (Western) and Saman Muthukumarana (UManitoba). We will be working with industry and government partners to combine various sources of population survey data such as capture-recapture, camera trap, telemetry, citizen science counts, and more!
The Cowen Lab is committed to fostering a diverse culture of inclusion where ideas can be openly and freely exchanged with mutual respect. We are committed to creating a safe working environment for all lab members and visitors. We value a diversity of views and will use critical thinking to support lab members.