Congratulations to PhD student Cosmo De Bonis-Campbell, who won an award from the organising committee of the National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE). Cosmo presented a talk on their research called ‘Citizen Science Species Population Modelling Using Bayesian Neural Fields’.
The National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE) award was presented in December 2025 at the NCSE annual meeting, which took place at St. Andrews University in Scotland. The NCSE is a joint research centre, spanning a number of institutions and provides an educational and networking venue for statistical ecologists, junior and senior.
Cosmo’s PhD is in Statistics, and their project is entitled ‘Deep Learning Methods For Large Citizen Science Datasets,’ which focuses on Lepidoptera. The PhD project is funded jointly by Butterfly Conservation and the University of Kent, to work towards a greener and more vibrant UK. Cosmos encourages anyone to take part and support the Big Butterfly Count this summer 2026. They are also on the committee of the Kent Students’ Union Psychedelic Society, a scientific and cultural interest group running since 2009.
Cosmo is pictured above with PhD student Rebecca Supple (winner) from the Centre of Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling at the University of St Andrews. Special thanks to Cosmos University of Kent supervisors Market Grzes, Eleni Matechou, Byron Morgan and Emily Dennis for their support.
We wish Cosmo all the best with their PhD journey!