Congratulations to Jonathan Babyn and Marcello Lanfranchi, winners of the 2024 AARMS Doctoral Thesis Award.
Dr. Jonathan Babyn received his PhD from Dalhousie University in November 2023, under the supervision of Dr. Joanna Mills Flemming, for a thesis entitled, “Counting all the Imaginary Fish and More”.
Avoiding overexploitation of marine resources requires being able to accurately estimate the size and health of a population. Dr. Babyn’s thesis presents methods that improve upon existing fisheries stock assessment methods. Having an estimate of the ages of fish in a sample can simplify stock assessment model development and allow more insight into stock structure. It first discusses a spatial Age Length Key (ALK) model that accommodates physical barriers to fish movement such as islands or bays. By incorporating spatial information and accounting for barriers in the construction of ALKs more accurate estimates of age can be obtained. Dr. Babyn’s thesis next focuses on effective population size, a concept used by conservationists and geneticists to summarize the overall genetic health of a population by giving the size of the population under the “ideal” Wright-Fisher model. It shows how using Close-kin mark recapture (CKMR) alone it is possible to estimate the effective population size as well as the variance in number of offspring enabling new insights into populations. Finally, it examines the applicability of CKMR to a population similar to the Sable Island grey seal colony through individual based simulation.
Dr. Marcello Lanfranchi received his PhD from Dalhousie University in October 2024 under the supervision of Dr. Geoffrey Crutwell and Dr. Dorette Pronk for a thesis entitled “A tangent category approach to operadic geometry”.
In many modern physics theories, such as general relativity, classical mechanics, or Yang-Mills theories, differential geometry plays a crucial role in describing some fundamental structures of these theories, such as connections, curvature, or torsion. Tangent category theory aims to provide a simple categorical framework to axiomatize these key structures in a model-independent fashion. In Lanfranchi’s thesis, the language of tangent category theory is employed in a new context: operadic geometry. This provides the first example of a model for non-commutative geometry fully described via a tangent category. This opens a new approach to “quantizing” the geometric structures at the core of modern physics.
Congratulations to both. Announcements of research presentations to be given by each of the winners will be circulated in the near future.