Rate My Professor Michael Noonan

Dr. Michael J. Noonan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and a BSc from Concordia University. A quantitative ecologist with more than a decade of research experience across three countries and five institutions, Dr. Noonan heads the Quantitative Ecology Lab. His research program focuses on disentangling complex biological patterns from statistical bias and developing statistical methods and software to address challenges in ecological data. Research interests include animal movement, conservation, encounter theory, evolutionary processes, macro-ecology, and statistical ecology.

Dr. Noonan teaches courses such as Evolutionary Ecology (Biol 417), Statistical Modelling for Biological Data (Biol 520C), and Spatial Statistics (DATA 589). The Quantitative Ecology Lab emphasizes the statistically efficient integration of ecological data into evidence-based conservation through two main lines of work: addressing issues of biology versus bias in statistical approaches and advancing macro-ecology and species conservation using high-quality data paired with advanced analytical tools. The lab has assembled one of the largest animal tracking datasets, involving over 1,300 individuals from 76 mammalian and avian species. Dr. Noonan has received an NSERC Discovery Grant to support the lab’s research. His work has resulted in numerous publications in journals including Methods in Ecology and Evolution and Conservation Biology.