Published on 17 October 2025
Last month, I was lucky enough to be announced as one of two recipients of the PhD scholarships from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Wellington Branch. They give these out annually. The award is unrestricted, and will go towards my living expenses here in Aotearoa New Zealand, as I am otherwise unfunded for my studies.
On their website, they added this blurb:
Richard’s thesis title is: Building Tools for Community Science Datasets to Model Bird Populations and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Aotearoa New Zealand. Community science platforms, such as eBird and iNaturalist, have enabled the creation of global observational datasets which afford unprecedented insights into natural biodiversity. The heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardisation, quality assurance, quality control and workflow management.
The goal of Richard’s research is to build tools that enable researchers to use these datasets with higher degrees of certainty, to develop workflows to allow for standardised, reproducible processing of the data, and to use case studies that offer meaningful insights into how community science can be used to understand epidemiology and population demographics - all in order to inform public policy.
In particular, Richard focuses on bird populations in Aoteaora New Zealand and Oceania, and on predicting the oncoming significant threat posed by Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. Richard’s supervisors are Kris Bubendorfer and Markus Luczac-Roesch.
As I mentioned in my application, this work was directly influenced by a talk I went to at the Royal Society Wellington, about avian bird flu arriving here, where I asked in the Q&A if anyone was modelling this. The answer was no - so, now there is. I want to thank the Royal Society Wellington Branch for starting me on this path, and for the award. I have promised to give a talk at the Royal Society at some point in the future about my continuing work.