Dr Josh Cullen is an Assistant Project Scientist in the Fisheries Collaborative Program at UC Santa Cruz and NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, specialising in DevOps and ecological research. His work focuses on developing software and operationalising ecological models to better understand how climate change affects marine animal distributions and to support sustainable fisheries by reducing bycatch and ship strikes.

As a quantitative ecologist, he uses large datasets to investigate how animals interact with their environments. His research interests include movement and population ecology, species’ ecological roles, niche partitioning and vertebrate movement patterns. He also develops interactive web applications and decision-support tools using Shiny.

His work draws on quantitative and geospatial methods, including Bayesian and state-space models, mixed-effects models, multivariate ordination and clustering, to address complex ecological questions.

Dr Cullen holds a PhD in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences from Texas A&M University (2019) and a BS in Biological Sciences from Clemson University (2013).