The Science and Technology Internship Program (STIP) partnership with fRI Research has had another success. Anja Sorensen completed her one year internship in March 2015 and has now joined the team at fRI Research as a wildlife research biologist with the Grizzly Bear Program.
Thanks to Natural Resource Canada’s investment in young researchers through the internship program, Anja has been able to jump start her career in the natural sciences by developing valuable skills and connections, achieving immediate employment, and amazingly, has already been published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
Grizzly Bear Program Lead Gord Stenhouse points out that fRI Research is a great fit for interns because they get to work as part of an multidisciplinary research team backed up by 16 years of geographic and ecological data. This ready-to-go wealth of data lets one year interns jump right in and do high quality science that tackles big, important questions.
“It’s really good for collaboration since there are lots of people with different expertise around,” said Anja. “If I needed help with GIS or RScript or proofreading, there was always someone just down the hall.”
We saw an opportunity to broaden Anja’s experience and connect her with one of our research collaborators at the University of Victoria.
The collaboration with Dr. Trisalyn Nelson and another member of the Spatial Pattern Analysis and Research (SPAR) Lab, Mathieu Bourbonnais, was so productive that their work is being published in the forthcoming paper “Effects of habitat quality and anthropogenic disturbance on grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) home range fidelity.” They found that year to year changes to grizzly bear home ranges couldn’t be explained just by habitat quality and human disturbance.
“I really appreciate all the efforts by my supervisor and coworkers to make my STIP internship such a valuable learning experience,” said Anja. “I developed a wide variety of technical abilities such as GIS, statistics, and scientific writing skills. Additionally, I gained public speaking practice and leadership capabilities.”
Find Anja’s paper here.
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