Short summer projects from our interns

September 6, 2019

This summer, Wild Animal Initiative hosted two summer interns, Anthony DiGiovanni and Dylan Quinn. Both were great additions to the Wild Animal Initiative team and wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors. Here’s a short summary of their contributions.

Dylan finished his undergraduate degree at Brandeis University in May 2019 before coming to work at Wild Animal Initiative. His previous coursework in the environmental sciences stimulated his interest in how the ethics and practice of environmental science relates to animal welfare. In addition to contributing to an ongoing systematic review of conservation physiology, Dylan investigated the history and development of different definitions of animal welfare. Dylan’s research will lay the groundwork for a future piece discussing these different definitions, and explaining how Wild Animal Initiative defines the concept of welfare. 

Anthony graduated from the University of Chicago in June 2019, and is embarking on a PhD in statistics at the University of Michigan. His work focused on improving the biological realism of a previously published model of predator-prey interactions and density-dependent population growth, adapting it to provide explicit information about animal age and cause of death. Using his new model, Anthony also investigated the sensitivity of these outcomes to specific population parameters. Anthony’s research will form part of an upcoming report on the ways in which wild animals die, as well as informing future research on the relationship between individual welfare and population density.

Thanks again to Dylan and Anthony for their hard work!