Harry Simmons

Education

MSc (Res), Marine Biology, University of Plymouth, England, 2022

Research Interests

Henry grew up in London and completed a bachelor's degree in marine biology and coastal ecology (1st class) at the University of Plymouth, UK. Their undergraduate thesis focused on model comparisons for habitat classification of shallow water environments using drone-acquired photos. Following this, Henry completed a Master of Research degree in Marine Biology at the University of Plymouth/Marine Biological Association, UK, where they worked on environmentally driven phenotypic restructuring in Artemia.

Before beginning their PhD, Henry volunteered at Coral Cay Conservation, LaMaVE, and worked as a student intern at NIVA in Oslo. For the past three years, they have been pursuing their Ph.D. research on advancing AI tools in remote sensing, with a focus on habitat and community mapping in Southern Australia. Their work uses machine learning and deep learning techniques, and they collaborate with researchers at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the A2I2 Institute at Deakin University. Henry has gained expertise in temperate ecological systems and the interdisciplinary space between ecology and computer science. Some of the tools in their arsenal include Random Forests, Convolutional Neural Networks, Self-supervised learning, and Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC) models.