Project Biographies

Stacy De Ruiter

Mark Johnson

Mark is a senior research fellow at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His research interests are in the development and application of high resolution biologging systems for studying wild animals. After completing a PhD in electronics engineering in New Zealand, he worked for 18 years at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in USA. There he joined with animal behaviourist, Peter Tyack, to develop a miniature sound and movement recording tag for cetaceans, dubbed the DTAG. This tag is now used widely in studies of foraging, social communication, locomotion and responses to anthropogenic sound in marine mammals. In 2011, Mark moved to St. Andrews where he is developing tags to study the long-term movements, behaviour and sound exposure of marine and terrestrial animals, with the goal of assessing the consequences of increasing environmental noise on animals. Mark Johnson

Catriona Harris

Catriona is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She has been carrying out research on the impact of anthropogenic noise on marine mammals for 10 years, and specifically behavioural responses of marine mammals to noise for the last 5 years. Most recently she was co-PI on the MOCHA project, which developed analytical methods for analyzing data from behavioural response studies, primarily derived from DTAGS. Catriona Harris

Tiago Marques

Tiago works as an Ecological Statistician, being a Senior Research Fellow in CREEM (University of St Andrews, UK) and an invited professor in DEIO (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal). A biologist by training, started working with freshwater fish, but the intense and constant questions about survey design and data analysis led to an MSc and a PhD in statistics. These were about extending distance sampling methods to account for measurement error in distances and animal density gradients. From 2007 till 2010 Tiago worked full time for DECAF, a project aimed at estimating cetacean abundance and density using passive acoustic data. From 2010 to 2015 worked full time on LATTE, a project aimed at integrating information about cetacean behaviour and movement collected at various spatial and temporal scales to predict the effect of human made noise like SONAR on cetaceans. Since 2015 Tiago has been working on number of different projects, generally involving density estimation from passive acoustic data. Over the years Tiago has worked mostly with cetaceans, but also with fish, both freshwater and marine, ungulates, birds, primates, carnivores, marsupials and even plants. I have the polar bear as a “pet” species, having designed, implemented and analysed data from 2004 and 2015 surveys of the Barents Sea polar bear sub-population, and having helped in the design of a couple of additional polar bear surveys in other areas of the high Arctic. I have a wider interest in the adequate use of statistics in ecology and the dissemination of statistics to a wider public in general. Tiago Marques

René Swift

René Swift is a research assistant within the Sound & Movement Tag Lab and part time PhD student. René has an honours degree in Zoology, a Masters degree in Oceanography, and 20 years of field experience. René could be called a “jack of all trades and a master of none”; he has broad research interests in sensory & foraging ecology, the impact of anthropogenic noise in the oceans, and the development and application of high resolution biologging systems. Within in the Sound & MovementTag Lab René is involved in Dtag development, construction, testing & calibration; he is also involved in writing and testing software tools for processing, analysing & visualising tag data. René is happiest in the field or in the lab creating things with his hands.René Swift.

Ye Joo Oh

Ye Joo Oh is an undergraduate at Calvin College, working towards a bachelor's in Computer Science. As a result, she loves programming in general. She plans to first delve into the industry after college, and then pursue a PhD in Computational Biology. She learned a lot from this opportunity, and will use the skills learned to enhance her future.

David Sweeney

David Sweeney is an undergraduate at Calvin College, working toward a bachelor's degree in biology. After college, he intends to pursue a Ph.D. in marine science. He is grateful to be part of the Animal Tag Tools team, on which he has acquired valuable skills and experiences he intends to carry into graduate school and his future career.

Lucía Martina Martín López

Lucía is a postgraduate researcher in the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is a marine biologist, with a MRes In Marine Mammal Science and a PhD focused on studying the fine scale biomechanics and bioenergetics of marine mammal's locomotion. Lucía is interested in understanding how animals overcome and exploit forces to move efficiently in their natural environment, and how these biomechanical strategies of locomotion can be affected by anthropogenic disturbance.

Lucía Martina Martín López.