Tucker Lancaster Awarded 2022 NSF GRFP

Congratulations to QBioS doctoral student, Tucker Lancaster, who was awarded a 2022 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.  The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost of education allowance of $12,000 to the institution.

Tucker works in the labs of Professor Patrick McGrath (Advisor) and Professor Todd Streelman.  For his GRFP application, Tucker proposed a collaborative project with the Georgia Aquarium that uses a combination of supervised and unsupervised Machine Learning techniques to automatically characterize the long-term behavioral patterns of whale sharks and other marine animals in their care. His aim is to use these insights to advance our understanding of species that are difficult to study in the wild, and to then leverage this understanding to drive more effective conservation efforts, improvements in the welfare of captive animals, and the development of new approaches for studying these species in their natural habitat.  Although Tucker's research has changed since he initially applied for the NSF-GRFP, his research focus continues to revolve around computational ethology.