Murray Christian

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr Murray Christian is a postdoctoral fellow at the Marion Island Marine Mammal Program, University of Pretoria, working with Dr. Chris Oosthuizen and Prof. Nico de Bruyn. His research focuses on cutting-edge statistical methods to analyse the rich elephant seal dataset from Marion Island. Currently, they are developing integrated population models, which combine different data types in a principled way. These allow researchers to estimate demographic parameters that are otherwise inaccessible, thus providing further insights into the drivers of elephant seal population dynamics. By training Murray is a mathematician, with expertise in differential geometry. and obtained his doctorate, which was closely related to the geometry of soap bubbles, from the University of Cape Town in 2019. Since then he has worked as an applied statistician during a postdoctoral fellowship at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. There his research used Bayesian methods to tackle problems in the biomedical sciences. Away from equations and code, Murray is an avid birder and amateur botanist. He enjoys contributing to citizen scientist projects, and do so quite actively for the Southern African Bird Atlas Project 2, eBird, and iNaturalist.

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