Phil is a PhD candidate in the Marine Mammal Research Program at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology, and a NOAA QUEST Fellow with the Cetacean Research Program at the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.
For his dissertation, he’s researching ways to improve stock assessments of non-migratory dolphins in Hawaiʻi. This includes automating photo-identification of these animals, understanding how these automated tools interact with capture-recapture models, and estimating demographic parameters using cutting edge methods in capture recapture.
He did his master’s with Krishna Pacifici at North Carolina State University, where he studied ways to improve estimates of species distribution, particularly when species interact and when the data contains sampling errors.
