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SORTEE member voices – Bawan Amin

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Bawan Amin.
 

Date: 07 July 2021.
 

Position: PhD-candidate.
 

Research and/or work interests: Animal behaviour and ecology, mainly focusing on patterns at the individual level.
 

How did you become interested in open research?
It was about the time of my second masters thesis (2016-2017) when I started to see that academia worked differently from what I would have expected. Academia seemed to be focused on impact factors, quantity and political choices, rather than the pursuit of knowledge for humanity, making it fundamentally different from what science is supposed to be. That’s where my interest in changing academia started. I now believe that opening up is a key step into changing back from academia to science.    

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SORTEE member voices – Vivienne Foroughirad

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Vivienne Foroughirad.
 

Date: 06 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Fellow.
 

Research and/or work interests: I’m a behavioral ecologist interested specifically in research reproducibility and transparency over the course of long-term studies.
 

If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
I would like to see more incentives for collaboration between early-career researchers. Co-authorships are often undervalued due to lack of or limited adherence to clear authorship guidelines, which in turn decreases the incentives to share data and work collaboratively with others, or to provide in-depth oversight on projects. Some career stages, like dissertation research, specifically discourage or prohibit in-depth collaboration, even though significant amounts of all research are conducted by graduate students as they are one of the cheapest sources of labor.    

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SORTEE member voices – Ellen Bledsoe

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Ellen Bledsoe.
 

Date: 06 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow.
 

Research and/or work interests: Community ecology, long-term community dynamics, data science, open science, DEI in STEM.
 

How did you become interested in open research?
I ended up in a wonderful PhD lab that is very strongly committed to Open Science. Before joining, I had honestly not spent much time thinking about the subject, and this aspect of the lab had little impact on my decision to join. I’m so glad, however, that I ended up in a group that helped me learn the importance of openness, reproducibility, and transparency in science!    

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SORTEE member voices – Maxime Fraser Franco

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Maxime Fraser Franco.
 

Date: 06 July 2021.
 

Position: PhD Student.
 

Research and/or work interests: My main research interest is on predator-prey interactions. I focus on studying the ecological and proximal mechanisms that shape the coexistence of foraging specialists and generalists within predator populations. More precisely, I evaluate how individual differences in predator foraging specialization defines individual differences in the type of prey they capture. These dynamics can be shaped by prey behaviour, habitat structure, and predator experience.
 
  Testing ecological hypotheses of individual behavioural variation in wild populations of free-ranging predators can impose considerable ethical, logistical, and financial challenges. Thus, to circumvent some of these difficulties, a part of my work is done using online multiplayer video games as my study system. Virtual worlds contain structured environments where complex trophic and social interactions occur. Some video game types, such as asymmetrical multiplayer horror games, can realistically reproduce a predator-prey interaction within multiple types of habitats. For instance, in these games, players vary in the strategies they use to succeed, while managing navigation and interactions within the virtual environment. Thus, although video games come with their own biases (as any study system) and are a simplified representation of reality, I believe they can provide valuable ecological insight for ecologists.    

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SORTEE member voices – Esteban Fernandez-Juricic

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Esteban Fernandez-Juricic.
 

Date: 06 July 2021.
 

Position: Professor of Biological Sciences.
 

Research and/or work interests: visual ecology, animal behavior, conservation ecology.
 

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
Editorial decisions should be based on the robustness of the experimental design and quality of data instead of the type of result (positive, negative)?    

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SORTEE member voices – Matt Grainger

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Matt Grainger.
 

Date: 05 July 2021.
 

Position: Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am an applied ecologist interested in how we use knowledge to better inform decision making in species conservation. I have a strong interest in developing tools that help people gather information in robust and transparent ways, interact with that information and make inference from it. I currently work on several projects that are fundamentally about how we make open research approaches (i.e. sharing data, sharing code, sharing best practice) as an integrated part of the workflow for biodiversity researchers and how we can take this open research and use it to help decision-makers find optimal solutions..
 

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