PhD Using Stan to Formally Integrate Ecology and Ethics

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Hope this is a sufficiently relevant post!

I am advertising a cool and genuinely inter-disciplinary PhD project at the University of St Andrews which will involve modelling complex ecology, citizen science observation processes and formal ethics frameworks - all brought together in Stan models. More complete description here: Bridging Philosophy and Ecology: Ethical Decision-Making in Wild Salmonid Conservation at University of St Andrews on FindAPhD.com.

Some key details:

  • The PhD is fully funded at the standard UK rate (note this is tax free, so not quite as low as it looks…)
  • It is open to international applicants.
  • It comes with a healthy training grant - we don’t expect applicants to already be experts in ecology, ethics and statistics!
  • The successful applicant will be part of the NetGain PhD cohort with regular opportunities to get interact and network https://netgain.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/
  • They will be based primarily at the world-leading statistical ecology Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling (CREEM), University of St Andrews.
  • They will also have the opportunity to spend time at the institutions of the other supervisors (University of Aberdeen, NatureScot, Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland, and UKCEH), particularly working on their policy teams.
  • The supervisor group are genuinely all lovely people and this is a new collaboration so we are all very invested in making it work!

Feel free to drop me an email or reply below if you have any questions!

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This sounds awesome. Understanding crowdsourcing is what drew me into Bayesian statistics in the first place—it’s a really great measurement problem. Please share your models as they come up or get published. I also really got into ecology models after a weeklong visit to University of Melbourne’s stat ecology group and doing some work with the Swiss Ornithological Institute, which is why there are so many of these models in our doc. I even went so far as to go to an ISEC meeting—it’s a really fun and welcoming community and very Bayes friendly.

Scotland is really great for grad school if you’re OK with short winter days balanced by endless summer days. St. Andrews is a lovely university town and it’s close to Edinburgh, where I went to grad school.

@fergusjchadwick is burying the lead—grad school is shorter in the UK than in the US, usually finishing in 4 years. It’s one of the reasons I stayed after the MS course.

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Thanks for the kind words @Bob_Carpenter! I’m biased but I think this is an awesome project and a brilliant place to do it. Get your applications in!!!