Ian Durbach
Dr Ian Durbach is a joint position as adjunct associate professor at SEEC and research fellow at the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews, and is an associate research fellow at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He joined the UCT Department of Statistical Sciences in 2005 as a lecturer and completed a PhD in multicriteria decision analysis, a branch of operations research, in 2011. He still does some work in this area, mainly around how uncertainty is thought about and represented in models, but his interest in recent years has moved to statistical ecology. Most of his current work involves developing and applying methods for estimating animal distribution and abundance, especially using spatial capture-recapture methods, and using machine learning to facilitate the classification of ecological images, audio, and video. His research interests are a bit of a mixed bag, but ultimately interested in developing and linking together approaches supporting data collection, analysis phases and into decision-making and policy implementation.