Dr Anabela Brandão

Anabela Brandão completed her BSc (Mathematical Statistics and Mathematics) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She then moved to the University of Cape Town for her postgraduate studies in Mathematical Statistics. Her MSc thesis “A stochastic model for daily climate’’ led to a research position in UCT’s Department of Statistical Sciences to further develop this model, while concurrently working on her PhD in Statistical Sciences entitled “A comparative study of stochastic models in biology’’. She also worked on subsequent projects titled “Interpolation of the daily rainfall model’’ and “Development of an objective statistical system to forecast summer rainfall over Southern Africa’’ as well as doing some part-time lecturing.

After the completion of her PhD, Anabela joined the MARAM Group in 1998. Presently her work involves the stock assessment of the South African abalone, kingklip and Patagonian toothfish fisheries, the development of a Management Procedure for the Patagonian toothfish and statistical analyses of catch per unit effort data of various fisheries and survey data and the analyses of illegal catch data for the South African west coast rock lobster. She has also been involved with the regular modelling of the southern right whales off South Africa. Other work has included the New Zealand and Namibian orange roughy, Namibian hake, Namibian rock lobster, penguins and analyses for various whale populations such as minke, humpback, blue, sperm and the Greenlandic sub-stocks of minke, bowhead, humpback and fin whales.