human-myriapoda

I am a first-year PhD student funded by Imperial's President PhD Scholarship. My project is aligned with the Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet Doctoral Training Program at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change. I received a BSc degree in Physics and a MSc degree in Astrophysics at the Université de Montréal. I am passionate about research, teaching, coding, and outreach, topped by a deep desire for social justice (namely neurodiversity, feminism, ecology, and mental health).

My project focuses on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), a list of 58 nations identified by the United Nations as facing unique sustainability challenges. A particular feature common to SIDS is their dependency on large water bodies (e.g., ocean, sea). Hence, the coastal area (the land-water border region), together with the surrounding water bodies, is generally referred to as their main economic, environmental, and cultural resource. Because of their high reliance on coastal areas, SIDS are qualified as heavily exposed to climate change, which directly affects both land and sea. The effects of climate change are already observed in SIDS, including an increase in natural disasters, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, and coastal erosion. Researchers normally attribute these environmental changes to being closely related to human activities; however, this is mostly qualitative rather than quantitative. The goal of this project is to fill this gap by exploring the connections between human activities and environmental factors using time series. To quantify human activities, we use socioeconomic data while we use freely-available satellite imagery for environmental factors. We use causal inference methods with the aim of finding new cause-effect relationships, but also to illustrate how each variable interacts with others on a larger scale.

May 2023