Bio |
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Nina Luisa Santostasi holds a Ph.D. in Evolutionary and Environmental Biology obtained in joint supervision by Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and Université de Montpellier, France. She has been collaborating with Dolphin Biology and Conservation since 2011, working on the demography and status assessment of dolphin populations. In 2011 she was awarded a fellowship for studying abroad by Sapienza University of Rome, that allowed her to study Statistics and Conservation Biology at North Carolina State University, USA. For her M.Sc. thesis she relied on individual photo-identification and capture-recapture models to obtain estimates of dolphin population abundance in the Gulf of Corinth, Greece. During her Ph.D. she developed models to assess the demographic consequences of anthropogenic hybridization on marine and terrestrial mammals: striped and common dolphin in Greece, and wolf and dog in Italy. In 2014 she collaborated with the Marine Mammal Behavioral Ecology Group at Texas A&M University, organizing photo-identification catalogs in a digital database. In 2016 she was awarded a grant by Sapienza University of Rome, which allowed her to specialize at the Biostatistics and Population Biology Department at the Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, Montpellier, France. Her main professional interest is the development and application of demographic models to assess the conservation status of animal populations, that can be used to optimize monitoring and inform management action. |