Leadership Flashcards
> What are some examples of where you saw things happen or change?Why did it happen?
Talk about stats beers - see PDF from before
On a broader scale, I run a weekly ecological statistics help group at Simon Fraser University for the biology, geography, and School of Resource and Environmental Management departments. Anywhere from 10 to 25 grad students, postdocs, and faculty meet to present problems they are having and discuss solutions. I lead the discussion, develop workshops, and frequently provide online help on our mailing list. In 2013, I extended this by co-developing and teaching a graduate-level course on data analysis and visualization that reached capacity of 20 enthusiastic student within days. I believe my mentoring has substantially increased the capacity for dozens of graduate students to conduct scientifically sound and compelling ecological research and filled a gap across multiple departments at our university.
> Who’s your conservation hero and why?
talk about RAM (and could also bring in Leopold)
> What has shaped your conservation biology values…
- reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac… Uncle’s favourite book when he was young; he gave me a copy for my 12th birthday and later that year took me on my first downriver canoe trip
> What’s your personal definition of leadership?
- To me there are many different types of leadership, and conservation biology needs all sorts of leaders
- the type of leadership that resonates with me is facilitating and bringing out the best in others
- I like to lead by example whenever possible
> To you, what are the most important attributes of a leader?
- being a good listener
- believes strongly in a given approach but not afraid to switch positions given new evidence
- an ability to see the big picture and focus on important details
- able to turn longterm goals into short term tasks with clear goals
- celebrates success
- tailors how he/she works with people based on their personality and needs
> Can you give us an example of your leadership? (describe the 4?)
What’s the order of importance here
Stats Beerz… developed into course
NESCent projects… focus on mapping paper
Mentoring other students… focus on Kyle?
ss3sim
I believe that my extensive mentoring of other graduate students demonstrates my strong leadership skills as an academic and shows what a wide influence I am having on conservation science at an early stage in my career. As a graduate student, I have mentored at least 13 thesis chapters from 10 graduate students through the majority of data analysis and visualization, and in many cases scientific question development and writing.
As one example, I advised Kyle Artelle (PhD Candidate, SFU) on how to incorporate uncertainty around grizzly bear mortality limits in British Columbia, Canada. I taught statistical principles, co-wrote extensive code, and co-developed visualizations to powerfully illustrate the high probability that these populations are over-hunted. Our work (Artelle et al. 2013, PLOS ONE, 8(1) e78041) was widely covered by the media and the subject of multiple debates at the BC Provincial Legislative Assembly.
On a broader scale, I run a weekly ecological statistics help group at Simon Fraser University for the biology, geography, and School of Resource and Environmental Management departments. Anywhere from 10 to 25 grad students, postdocs, and faculty meet to present problems they are having and discuss solutions. I lead the discussion, develop workshops, and frequently provide online help on our mailing list. In 2013, I extended this by co-developing and teaching a graduate-level course on data analysis and visualization that reached capacity of 20 enthusiastic student within days. I believe my mentoring has substantially increased the capacity for dozens of graduate students to conduct scientifically sound and compelling ecological research and filled a gap across multiple departments at our university.
Beyond mentoring individual students, when I was at the University of Washington, I led a group of 12 graduate students and postdocs in developing the ss3sim software package for R to facilitate rapid and reproducible analysis of fisheries stock assessment methods (see my proposal). Beyond simply leading this endeavour, I taught my collaborators important software development tools such as the version control, which are facilitating their own research since. Our work has so far produced four papers with simple guidelines for stock assessment scientists and is being adopted at the NOAA’s NWFSC.-
As one example, on the side of my PhD, I led the analysis component of the showpiece research project at a NESCent working group (now in review at Science).
We took all the marine fossil data from the last 23 million years, built a predictive model of extinction, and developed a method to project this “intrinsic extinction risk” onto all modern distribution records of coastal marine species across mammals, sharks, echinoids, gastropods, scleractinian corals, and bivalves.
Our maps inform us about what the pattern of extinction in the oceans would look like without humans. Furthermore, by contrasting them with global patterns of climate velocity and human impact we believe they can play an important role in conservation planning. For example, areas with high intrinsic fossil risk may need extra attention to reach conservation targets and ignoring their intrinsic risk may lead to ecological surprises — a concept related to the topic of my Smith Fellowship proposal.
> What’s your personal definition and thoughts on conservation-scienceadvocacy?
I believe strongly in advocacy for science- and evidence-based decision making. E.g. bring in the grizzly bear paper
I also believe that since we are human we have our own underlying values and there are times when it is appropriate to include our values in our advocacy, but that we need to be clear about when we’re shifting from science and evidence to value judgements.
Often we can make this clear by using if statements. If we as a society want this then this is what we need to do…
