Dr Kim Kenobi

I have been working as a Statistics Lecturer at Aberystwyth University since October 2014.  I have a keen interest in biological applications of statistics.  My research has included applications of statistical shape analysis (shapes of protein surfaces, shapes of vertebrae in mammals, shapes of dolphins and whales, shapes of plant root systems), Curlew ecology, dolphin biology, plant biology, bacterial genomics and parasite ecology.  

Before arriving in Aberystwyth, I spent 11 years in Nottingham, completing a PhD in Statistical Shape Analysis in 2007 and spending 6 ½ years as a statistics postdoc on a multidisciplinary plant biology project.

I teach on various third year and Master's level courses, including Topics in Biological Statistics, Statistical Concepts, Methods and Tools, Statistical Techniques for Computational Scientists as well as Graduate School courses for PhD students, Skills in Bioinformatics for Biologists and Statistics in Context: Collecting, Handling and Presenting Data.

My PhD at the University of Nottingham was in Statistical Shape Analysis.  This built on my MRes project, which was about the shapes of dolphins and whales, and their evolutionary relationships.  The topics for my PhD included the shapes of vertebrae in rats and primates and the shapes of enzyme binding sites.  Since completing my PhD, I have applied Statistical Shape Analysis to plant root systems, during my time as a postdoc in Nottingham on a multidisciplinary plant biology project, the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology.  I am currently working on a project using Statistical Shape Analysis to consider the shapes of Cichlid fish in the Great African Lakes (lakes Malawi, Tanganyika and Victoria).  One thing I am particularly interested in is the relationship between morphological differences between species and their evolutionary relatedness.

In addition to Statistical Shape Analysis, I have an interest in species distribution modelling. I was involved in the multidisciplinary ECHOES project between December 2019 and June 2023, which was looking at the effect of climate change on bird coastal communities on both sides of the Irish Sea.  I was lead author on a paper about the overwintering distributions of Curlew in Britain and Ireland that over the period 2003 to 2019 that made use of land use data from satellites and environmental variables to assess the habitat preferences of Curlew between November and February.

I currently have two PhD students working on dolphin datasets, one on an observational dataset of the dolphins in Cardigan Bay, West Wales, and the other using network theory to analyse a dataset of the dolphins off the east coast of Scotland.  Since arriving in Aberystwyth, I have co-supervised two other PhD projects, one on using ordinary differential equations to model tick-borne diseases in ecological communities and another on bacterial genetics.