Title: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Ecology
Institution: University of Montana
Email: mahdieh.tourani@umontana.edu
Phone: (406) 243-5521
Research Interests: Wildlife population monitoring, Quantitative ecology, noninvasive survey methods, mammals, carnivores
Biographical Sketch:
Mahdieh Tourani is an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Ecology in the Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences and the Wildlife Biology Program at the University of Montana, Missoula. She has worked and studied in seven different institutes across three continents. She completed her PhD in 2020 at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences on carnivore population monitoring in Scandinavia and South Asia. After her PhD, Mahdieh has worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis, where she performed research on North American mammal communities and contributed to Wildlife Insights analytics. Her main interest is to develop statistical models to overcome challenges associated with wildlife population monitoring at large scales, such as data sparsity and imperfect observations. She is also developing decision-support tools to facilitate the use of statistical ecology for wildlife management and conservation.