Jack and Sylvia Burry University Fellows Endowment

My research fellowship focused on understanding how five species of obligate army-ant-following birds make foraging decisions in the Peruvian Amazon. These highly specialized birds feed solely on insects and other prey that are flushed from the forest floor by swarms of army ants, creating a unique system in which multiple bird species compete for the same food resource. Using a long-term dataset collected by Dr.

I created a series of educational modules and data repositories for college-level statistics classes that use real-world sports data from figure skating, pickleball, soccer, and other sports to teach important statistical concepts, including ANOVA, Confidence Intervals, Data Manipulation, Log Transformation, and more. To adapt this approach for younger students, I also developed high school-level worksheets and lesson plans inspired by the New York Times' "What's Going on in This Graph?" series.

St. Lawrence University is a private institution located in Canton, NY. With around 2,250 students enrolled on campus each year, there are many disciplines, course options, and routes to take for new students. Students may meet with their advisers to help guide them on the correct path of courses, or they may choose to guide themselves. Every student goes through the registration process themselves, however. And every professor is on the receiving end of that registration process. At St. Lawrence there are three days of registration for students.

Drones are uncrewed vehicles that operate under the direction of software running on a “flight computer” – a computer that controls the drone as it travels along a pre-programmed path. This research dealt with  increasing the resiliency of the drone in the face of computer failures. We developed a method for transplanting certain sensor data from one flight computer to another, allowing a backup computer to take over the job of the flight computer while the problem is fixed.