People

Here is a list of affiliated people.

Dave Skirvin

Joint Technical Director of the Modelling, Software and Geospatial Sciences team in ADAS. Dave specialises in the development of models and tools to allow assessment and development of agricultural policy. This encompasses a wide range of aspects of agricultural production, including crop protection, diffuse pollution, biodiversity, land use and land use change. His interests include agricultural resource use efficiency modelling, land use and land use change modelling and crop protection modelling. He has significant experience in the development of models and software, having produced software tools for a range of clients including UK Government, levy bodies, UK agencies and global agrochemical companies. Dave currently manages the databases and code for the UK Greenhouse Gas and Ammonia Emission Inventory for Agriculture, and an API that provides the underpinning methodology as a reference methodology for calculation of emission at a farm scale. He also manages the database that underpins the Defra Survey of Crop Pests and Diseases. Dave’s current focus is on developing integrated tools to support decisions on farm and land management and the modelling the impacts of land-use change on the environment, particularly habitat creation & restoration and biodiversity impacts.

More information here.

Simon Gubbins

Simon Gubbins is group leader in Transmission Biology at The Pirbright Institute. He has over 25 years’ experience applying mathematical and statistical approaches to biological data. His main research interest is understanding the transmission of viral diseases of livestock across scales. This work explores the question of how the dynamics of viruses at one scale (for example, within an animal or within a farm) influence the dynamics at another scale (for example, between animals or between farms). A particular focus of his work is the epidemiology of foot-and-mouth disease and bluetongue, integrating field and laboratory data for these diseases into mathematical frameworks that can be used to inform disease control policy.

More information here.

Hayley Carr

I joined the Babraham Institute as a Biostatistician in the Bioinformatics group in July 2023. I support scientists with their experimental design, data analysis and statistics, including providing advice, teaching statistics courses, and undertaking consultancy work. I work across many different projects, with several so far being in proteomics data analysis. Previously, I completed my PhD at the University of Birmingham on ‘Transcriptional and histological characterisation of the synovium in early inflammatory arthritis’, which had a large bioinformatic and data analysis component. I then worked in health policy for a short time, focusing on the use of genomics and emerging technologies in healthcare.

More information here.

Stephen Gregory

Organisation: Centre for Environment, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Science

Location: Weymouth, UK

Profile: I’m an ecologist, conservationist, fisheries scientist, and statistician. I have been fortunate to work in many wonderful places, with many wonderful people. I joined as a member of NABES in 2025.

More information here.

Andrew Mead

Head of Statistics at Rothamsted Station, Andrew enjoys promoting the application and development of statistical and mathematical approaches to add value to the wide range of biological research at Rothamsted Research, and more widely within the life sciences. He is particularly interested in the statistical topics of the design of experiments, statistical (regression) modelling, and multivariate statistical approaches. He has applied this expertise in seed viability and germination, insect pest and plant disease studies, plant nutrition, modelling the weed life cycle, gene expression studies, landscape-scale impacts of bioenergy on ecosystem service, and mushroom production. He is also interested in the development of training courses and materials for non-statisticians. He would like to provide biological researchers with an appropriate statistical background knowledge and awareness of the potential for the application of statistical approaches to enhance their research. One current research area is the multivariate analysis and statistical modelling of metagenomics data, with applications to the spatial variation of communities of antibiotic resistance genes in river catchments, and to the soil microbial communities found in different agricultural growing environments. A second current research area is the statistical design of long-term field trials to assess metrics of sustainability, and the development to model-based analyses of data from long-term experiments.

More information here.

Dave Miller

I work as a senior statistician at BioSS with close links to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

I work on all kinds of ecological (and sometimes non-ecological) problems. I've spent a lot of time working out how to count animals and plants using statistics and computers, including models for detection (accounting for how observers might miss seeing animals, usually involving the distance between them) and building spatial models (where are the animals, and how do they relate to biological factors like vegetation cover and sea temperature?). In particular I've worked on attempting to include uncertainty from model components and from underlying environmental data.

One of my big research areas is generalized additive modelling: that is how to we include flexible, wiggly components in our models to describe the complicated relationships between things.

I’m also interested in how different statistical models are equivalent in some way and can be used to gain insights into each other.

Previously: I worked as a research fellow at the Centre for Research into Ecological & Environmental Modelling and the School of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of St Andrews. While there I worked on improving spatial models for cetacean abundance and distribution with funding from the US Navy’s Living Marine Resources programme. I’ve also worked at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (sic) in Woods Hole, MA, the University of Rhode Island and CSIRO in Hobart, Tasmania.

Outside of work I'm a runner (10k-half trail), boulderer (with a bit of sport climbing too), (bad) birder/gull enthusiast and board gamer. I like making weird things on the internet.

More information here.

Ed Harris

I am a statistician and data scientist at Harper Adams University with over 20 years of experience in experimental design and data analysis, research, and consulting in academia and the private sector, with subject expertise in agriculture, ecology, and conservation. I have extensive experience building complex solutions to data analytic problems and in communicating results to diverse stakeholders, including academics, business professionals, the media, and the public. My specific research interests include computer vision applications in agri-tech and ecology. I am the Director of the Agriculture Data Science Research Centre at Harper Adams University and a Fellow of the Royal Statistics Society.

Outside of work I love wildlife spotting and riding all kinds of motorcycles in all kinds of places.

More information here.

Eleanor D'Arcy

Eleanor D’Arcy is a senior advisor in Statistics at the Environment Agency. She works on the Defra funded Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) programme. This is a science innovation and transformation programme set up to collect data on the extent, condition and change over time of England’s land and water environments, as part of the UK government’s commitment to leave the environment in a better state for future generations. Eleanor’s interest lie with environmental and ecological statistics, particularly data integration, monitoring network design and statistical modelling.

Eleanor completed her PhD at Lancaster University on ‘Extreme value methods for protecting and maintaining critical infrastructure from natural hazards’ which was in collaboration with EDF Energy. She is passionate about cross-disciplinary collaboration with academia, industry and the public sector. Eleanor also enjoys outreach activities to inspire the next generation of statisticians and challenge preconceptions about what it means to be a mathematician. In 2023/24 she was a William Guy lecturer for the Royal Statistical Society, where she delivered lectures across the UK on ‘How can statistics protect us against extreme sea levels resulting from climate change?’

More information here.

Fiona Underwood

UK-NABES Workshop co-facilitator with Megan Towers & Harriet Low

I currently work as an independent statistical consultant/researcher. I build statistical approaches to help inform decision making especially on the sustainable management of bioresources (e.g. deer, fish) and the (illegal) wildlife trade in the UK and overseas.

I have experience of working as a statistician within or for (I)NGOs, (international) research organisations, universities and public sector bodies within the environmental, conservation, climate change and food security sectors.

More information here.

Harriet Low

Organisation: Rothamsted Research

Location: Harpenden

NABES Role: UK-NABES workshop co-facilitator, alongside Fiona Underwood and Megan Towers.

Rothamsted role: I am working on a secondary analysis project aiming to integrate existing, disparate data to answer new questions. Part of this has involved text analysis of publication abstracts to map the institutional research landscape.

Previously, I completed an MSc programme in Applied Data Science for Ecology and Evolution at the University of Exeter

More information here.

Luca Porcu

My name is Luca. I was born on November 22, 1973, in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. I am a biostatistician. For about 15 years I have been involved in statistical design and analysis of clinical studies in Milan, Italy. Then I discovered the complexity of biology by chance. I became a member of the Institutional Animal Welfare and Ethics Review Body as methodologist. I completed my PhD at the Open University with a thesis on the methodological pitfalls of Preclinical In Vivo Antitumour Activity Experiments. I joined the CRUK Cambridge Institute in April 2023. I am involved in the statistical design and analysis of preclinical in vivo experiments and, broadly, preclinical data. I am a member of the Institutional Animal Welfare and Ethics Review Body.

More information here.

Mark Brewer

Research Interests

My main statistical research interests are in the following areas:

• Statistical methodology applied to food authenticity studies.
• Bayesian risk modelling.
• Bayesian spatial-temporal modelling.
• Climate envelope models for ecological data sets.
• Constrained optimisation for ordinal response regression models.

Current and Recent Projects

• Creating a scientific definition for New Zealand Manuka Honey.
• Estimating collision risk for bats at wind farms.
• The effect of between-sample heterogeneity on standard statistical model selection methods.
• Probabilistic drought risk in forested landscapes.

Wider Involvements

• President, International Biometric Society British and Irish Region

More information here.

Megan Towers

Organisation: NatureScot

Location: Inverness

NABES Role: UK-NABES workshop co-facilitator, alongside Fiona Underwood and Harriet Low. Equality, diversity and inclusion responsibilities. Researcher co-lead, Champion for Outreach for Government and Policy.

NatureScot role: Help with the production NatureScot’s Official Statistics and other reporting requirements. Provide statistics advice to my colleagues, which covers a wide range of nature conservation, ecology, and the environment. Network lead for NatureScot’s Disability, Ability, Wellbeing and Neurodiversity Network.

More information here.

Nick Schurch

I joined BioSS as the Principal Statistician for Ecology & Environmental Science in 2019 and lead the Ecology and Environmental Science team at BioSS. In this role, I line manage four statisticians (who are primarily embedded with the James Hutton Institute at Craigiebuckler in Aberdeen), oversee and lead the teams consultancy collaborations (both external and as part of the current RESAS Strategic Research Programme), oversee the wider BioSS consultancy programmes with NatureScot and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, lead BioSS consultancy work on forensic science work, and supervise three PhD students working on applied environmental science & ecology problems, alongside working on my own personal research interests.

More information here.

Pete Henrys

Dr Pete Henrys is a chartered statistician — CStat, Royal Statistical Society — at UKCEH, with over 15 years’ experience of monitoring network design and large scale spatial and temporal analysis of environmental data. He has led teams to design multiple long term monitoring programmes which are now successfully operational. These include: the design of the Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (Welsh Government); the Northern Ireland Countryside Survey (DAERA); the England Ecosystem System Survey (Defra); and, the Small Streams Network (EA). He has also advised the EA and NRW on the design and development of their sentinel river networks.

Pete has developed approaches for upscaling survey data to large, national scale maps while quantifying the uncertainty. He has led teams across a number of projects as PI and Co-I to develop novel analytical approaches to link key environmental indicators to different drivers across spatial and temporal scales. He has experience of analysing complex large-scale data sets and integrating across different scales and structures using both Bayesian and multivariate approaches. Pete sits on committees for the Royal Statistical Society and the National Trust.

More information here.