Who We Are?
Grant Humphries
Academically, Grant’s career started at Memorial University where his love for the ocean and birds combined after a field season in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. He continued on to do a Masters in Alaska and a PhD in New Zealand, working on Procellariiform seabirds with a focus on utilizing machine learning for quantifying complex ecological relationships. His work took him onwards to California and then to New York where he began working with Antarctic penguins and now acts as the co-director of science for Oceanites. He moved to Scotland in 2016 where he started a small data science consultancy (Black Bawks Data Science) analyzing data to quantify the impacts of offshore windfarms on seabirds and marine mammals. Grant has been involved with the WSU since 2010 as communications officer and was the progenitor of the world seabird twitter conference. He was previously the host Seabird Sessions and 60 second seabird science.
“I was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and as part of that became fond of all things on the ocean. I grew up around puffins, shearwaters, gannets and whales, and have been birding since I was a young kid. When I did my first field work in Alaska with leach’s storm-petrel, I was hooked on seabirds and never looked back. “