IOZ researcher heads to the USA
Friday 4 May 2012
IOZ's Becki Lawson has been awarded funding from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to visit a range of institutions in the USA specialising in wildlife disease investigation and health surveillance over the next few weeks.
© Becki Lawson
The Trust awards Travelling Fellowships to British citizens from all walks of life to travel overseas, to bring back knowledge and best practice for the benefit of others in their UK professions and communities. Becki will visit scientists at Cornell , Princeton and Tufts universities and the National Wildlife Health Center , Madison.
© Yousuf Karsh/Camera Press Becki's project, 'Optimising a citizen science approach to national wildlife health surveillance', aims to develop the work she has been doing in the Garden Bird Health initiative
. Using this model, she hopes to expand public-based wildlife health surveillance in Britain to include not just birds but other wildlife species, including hedgehogs and amphibians.
This Travel Fellowship will allow her to learn about other successful citizen science projects in the US, to establish research collaborations and to gain tools and expertise that will be helpful for IoZ’s research on her return to Britain.
