Nancy Heckman is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics, University of British Columbia. Her research interests include, but not limited to functional data analysis and applications to evolutionary biology, nonparametric regression via splines, kernels and local polynomials; shapes of regression functions. Professor Heckman has used functional data analysis techniques in many application areas.  She has worked with evolutionary biologists on a range of projects, developing and applying statistical methods to study the evolution of physical traits that are functions. Professor Heckman has several co-authored papers on developing functional data analysis techniques for the analysis of energy consumption, where each curve gives energy consumed as a function of time. Recently, she has become involved with collaborative research on animal movement, using hidden Markov models.
 

Andrew Trites is a Professor and Director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. He has been studying marine mammals in the North Pacific for 40 years, and leads a research program designed to further the conservation and understanding of marine mammals, and resolve conflicts between people and marine mammals.  He has served on many advisory committees and independent panels that involve marine mammals and species at risk.
 

Marie Auger-Méthé is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics, Institute for the Oceans & Fisheries, University of British Columbia. She is broadly interested in developing and applying statistical tools to infer behavioural and population processes from empirical data. Her work tends to focus on marine and polar animals, but the methods she develops are often applicable to a wide range of species and ecosystems. Her recent work has centred on modelling animal behaviour using movement data and developing hierarchical models for spatial and/or temporal data.