Post provided by Samniqueka Halsey

Black History Month is a UK-wide celebration that takes place every October, acknowledging and raising awareness of the contribution that Black African and Caribbean communities have made in Britain and across the globe. We are excited to promote and profile the work of Black ecologists and evolutionary biologists across the British Ecological Society blogs.

My name is Dr. Samniqueka Halsey, and I am a computational ecologist. I use modelling and statistics to answer questions about the way the world works. In particular, I try to inform management actions about disease emergence and conservation with my models. I have worked on projects regarding Lyme disease, Chronic Wasting Disease and a dune thistle that is threatened by habitat fragmentation. I realized that I genuinely wanted to become an ecologist starting in my junior year of college when I took an ecology course. This class exposed me to the joys of fieldwork, going outside, and collecting data. Combined with a few more courses such as aquatic ecology where I could go out to streams and lakes to collect water samples and then go back to the lab to analyze, it was fascinating. I was even able to be a field technician in Arizona, where I helped to trap prairie dogs to collect blood and ectoparasites to test for the plague.