Vaughn Shirey, a Biology Ph.D. student in the Ries Lab, has won a major global research award!
Breaking news! Vaughn Shirey, a Ph.D. student in the Ries Lab, has won a major global research award, the 2020 Young Researchers Award from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility! They have been recognized for their incredible work in modeling the biodiversity and richness of Papilionidae butterflies indigenous to boreal forests in Europe and North America. While modeling of biodiversity data for these species is crucial to our understanding of the impacts of climate change, differences in the availability of these data result in biases that limit the effectiveness of the models. For this reason, Shirey’s work, which implements a pseudo-sampling technique to account for and minimize biases in GBIF data, is essential to conservation efforts around the world. We are so excited to watch them become a leader in biodiversity informatics! Congratulations, Vaughn!
More information will be shared at a press release on October 13th, so stay tuned!