Background

Dr. Camille Ross is a quantitative marine ecologist who builds predictive models of endangered species and their habitats from large, complex oceanographic and biological datasets. Her expertise spans species distribution modeling, density surface modeling, and applied machine learning, which she uses to translate ecological data into tools that directly inform conservation and management decisions — most often in service of protecting the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, where she is collaborating with the Maine Department of Marine Resources’ Marine Mammal Division to build models of large whales using visual and passive acoustic (PAM) data collected by the ME DMR.

Dr. Ross completed her Ph.D. in Oceanography at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center in 2025, with a dissertation focused on modeling North Atlantic right whales and their prey. During her Ph.D., she spent several years working in the Tandy Center for Ocean Forecasting at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and, most recently, as an Associate Research Scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium, where she built density surface models from aerial survey data to support right whale conservation efforts in Cape Cod Bay. She holds a B.A. in Environmental Computation from Colby College.

Her research sits at the intersection of oceanography, zooplankton ecology, and endangered species management — using tools like boosted regression trees and neural networks to model Calanus copepod prey fields and project how right whale foraging habitat may shift as the Gulf of Maine and surrounding waters continue to change. She is the author/co-author of seven peer-reviewed publications and often gives public talks on data-driven approaches to species conservation, including recent work connecting oceanographic regime shifts to right whale density estimates.

Beyond research, Dr. Ross is committed to increasing public awareness of conservation issues and the accessibility of her field, through public talks, guest lectures, media interviews, and mentoring early-career scientists and students interested in coding, modeling, and marine science.