I am an undergraduate mathematics and IT student at QUT and a Research Assistant under the supervision of Dr. Erin Peterson and Distinguished Professor Kerrie Mengersen. I have recently worked on a vacation research project which aimed to provide estimates of koala abundance in an area where little information is currently available. This urgent conservation problem was addressed by combining expert knowledge with models using virtual reality. As a Research Assistant at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS), my current duties include processing spatial data using R and ArcGIS, running expert elicitation sessions, and statistical modelling/machine learning. During my time at ACEMS, I hope to build on my vacation research project by collecting and processing more data for use in statistical models, investigating the effects of additional covariates, and further developing the expert elicitation protocol using virtual reality. I also look forward to applying the skills I have learnt to other collaborative projects.
