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Current Students

Undergraduate & Honours Students

Kate Vonderbank

I am working towards an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences with a concentration in environmental and integrative physiology. I am fortunate to be doing my honours with the Davoren Lab, which allowed me to spend the summer on the coast of Newfoundland collecting data for my project! I will be examining the quality of capelin and sand lance as prey items for many top predators, by determining their energy densities (cal/g).

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Olivia Roy

I am currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences with a concentration in ecology and environmental biology at the University of Manitoba. My research in the Davoren Lab examines how attaching GPS tracking devices to Atlantic puffins impacts chick growth. In my free time I enjoy hiking and kayaking in Nopiming Provincial Park, Manitoba, where my love for biology began!

Masters Students

Megan Dalton (she/her)

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I am currently a master's student in the Davoren Lab studying Atlantic Puffin foraging ecology in Newfoundland. I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I first became captivated by birds in high school by helping to monitor raptor nest success with my mom in the west desert and by volunteering at the local aviary. I received my undergraduate degree in Biology at Westminster College and then went on to work for various field monitoring, applied conservation, and habitat restoration projects for the next 16 years in places such as the Western and Central Pacific Oceans, the South Atlantic Ocean, and mainland United States. I especially love small, remote islands and their unique flora and fauna (almost as much as I get motion-sick on my way there) and I reckon that I've had the good fortune of spending over three years cumulatively in these wonderful places. I look forward to more fieldwork on James Island, Newfoundland this coming summer.  

I acknowledge that my birthplace of Salt Lake City, Utah is the traditional homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes. Our field site in Northeastern Newfoundland is the unceded, traditional territory of the Beothuk and the Mi'kmaq. 

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Megan

Sierra Schlief

Hi, I'm Sierra! I'm from Bemidji, MN, and I moved to Canada to complete my Bachelor of Environmental Science at the University of Manitoba. I joined the Davoren lab in the fall of 2023 to start my master's. For my first chapter, I will determine if capelin beach spawning locations have site-specific chemical signatures based on larval capelin otolith microchemistry. My second chapter will examine sand lance otolith signatures to uncover their life-history traits.  

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Sierra
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Katrina Wilcox (they/them)

Katrina is joining the Davoren Lab in fall 2022 after completing a B.Sc. in biology at the University of Winnipeg with an honours thesis focused on the influence of foraging strategies of bird-window collision susceptibility. For their M.Sc., Katrina will be investigating seabird vocalisations at deep water capelin spawning sites on the Newfoundland coast. Katrina is specifically interested in how the use of seabird vocalisations change within social and behavioural contexts.

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Kristina McOmber

I grew up and attended undergrad in California, and started my Master's in May 2022 looking at the pre-breeding behavior and diet of Razorbills and Atlantic Puffins in the north Atlantic. In the past, I have worked with seabirds in the Gulf of Maine, the Bering Sea, and the eastern and central Pacific. 

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Carolyn Currie (she/her) 

I am a M.Sc. student in the Davoren Lab co-supervised by Dr. Gail Davoren (University of Manitoba) and Dr. Hannah Murphy (Fisheries and Oceans Canada). For my M.Sc., I will use otolith chemistry to explore natal homing and connectivity of Atlantic herring in Newfoundland - the unceded, traditional territory of the Beothuk and the Mi'kmaq. I recently graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) from the University of Manitoba. In my honours thesis research I used stable isotope methods to determine the primary flight feather moult patterns of Atlantic puffins, under the supervision of Dr. Gail Davoren. If I’m not on campus or doing field work,  you can likely find me canoe-camping or at the pool, where I enjoy coaching artistic swimming!

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Gibson Rieger

I joined the Davoren Lab in 2021, writing my honours thesis on predation and kleptoparasitism on Atlantic puffins by gulls at a seabird breeding colony. I completed my B.Sc. in Biological Sciences, majoring in Ecology & Environmental Biology with a minor in Microbiology, at the University of Manitoba in February 2023 and began work as an aquatic science technician with Fisheries and Oceans Canada at the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg. Now continuing in the Davoren Lab, I started my M.Sc. in May 2023 looking at the diel behaviour of sand lance and mapping forage fish habitat on the Newfoundland coast. 

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Leah Pengelly

Leah joined the Davoren lab in September 2020 after completing her B.Sc. Honour at Dalhousie University in 2014 and then working as a biologist in Nunavut. Her Masters research will focus on the soundscape ecology of the Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area, in Nunavut. She will use passive acoustic recordings to determine the amount of noise in the ecosystem from biological, geological, and anthropogenic sources. Leah will incorporate Inuit traditional knowledge and conduct cooperative knowledge production with local communities during her research.

Doctoral Students

Matthew Legard

Matthew completed his M.Sc. in 2017 at the University of Hull, UK where he studied the effects of personality in captive Gentoo penguins. He then worked as an aquarist at an aquarium, The Deep, before moving to Winnipeg to start a Ph.D. in the Davoren Lab at the start of 2021. He is interested in examining personality in populations of seabirds found in Newfoundland and how this effects things like foraging behaviour and breeding success.

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Mikala

Mikala completed her M.Sc. in fall 2019, which continued the project she started during her B.Sc., investigating humpback whale vocalizations in the Newfoundland region using a hydrophone to passively record on a known capelin spawning site. Her research focused on characterizing the vocalizations and comparing a subset of the repertoire to calls recorded on a Hawaiian breeding ground in the 1980's. After a small break Mikala has rejoined the Davoren lab to do her Ph.D. in collaboration with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 

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Emily

Emily Runnells (she/her)

A first-generation student of settler origin, originally from the unceded lands of the Pennacook Abanaki, I returned to academia to start my PhD in January 2020. My research is based in the ancestral homeland of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq, in Northeastern Newfoundland, where I focus on the non-breeding ecology of seabirds, addressing questions about niche overlap of alcids, migratory connectivity of Atlantic Puffins, and carry-over effects and molt energetics of Razorbills (aka Tinker). I previously worked as a Marine Zoologist for the New York Natural Heritage Program and received my M.Sc. from the University of Washington's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, where I studied changes in seabird foraging, forage fish, and plankton community composition in the Salish Sea.  

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Post-Doctoral Fellows

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Ashley Tripp (she/her)

I am a settler from the Treaty 4 lands of the Haudenosaunee People in southern Ontario. My research examines recruitment dynamics of larval capelin, an important cultural, ecological, and commercial forage fish species in Newfoundland, the unceded ancestral homelands of the Beothuk and the Mi'kmaq. My research is interested in factors influencing the Newfoundland and Labrador capelin stock that might be impeding recovery following a population collapse in the early 1990s and exploring connectivity using otolith chemistry in recently hatched fish. I am a recent Ph.D. graduate in Nov 2023 from the Davoren Lab and I’m so pleased to be able to continue my work with capelin and local fishers in Newfoundland. When I’m not at the lab bench or in the field I enjoy playing soccer and paper crafting.  

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