Jim Faulkner graduated in spring quarter 2019. Last May, he successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled, “Adaptive Bayesian Nonparametric Smoothing with Markov Random Fields and Shrinkage Priors” under the guidance of his doctoral supervisory committee chair Vladimir Minin, Department of Statistics (UW/UC Irvine).

While pursuing his degree, Jim worked full-time as a Mathematical Statistician at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, WA where he continues to work following his graduation. His research there, as summarized on the NOAA website, focuses “on survival estimation of juvenile and adult salmon using capture-recapture methods, and on developing models to describe the passage experience of salmonids through the hydropower system on the Snake and Columbia Rivers. These passage models help inform the Comprehensive Passage Model (COMPASS), which is used for in-season predictions and for investigating management scenarios. His research interests involve the development of mathematical and statistical models for ecological and evolutionary processes.”