Abby is originally from Seattle, USA where she is currently wrapping up her PhD in quantitative ecology at the University of Washington. Her PhD focuses on the development of integrated population models to better understand the dynamics of endangered avian species. She is particularly interested in the demography of small or declining populations and the statistical techniques we use to study them. Among those, she has extensive experience with Bayesian hierarchical models. She has a background in statistics and applied mathematics more generally and a strong interest in communicating complex methods and results in an accessible way.