Santiago Martínez Balvanera

I am an Associate Lecturer in Computational Ecology in the People and Nature Lab at UCL. I’ve recently completed my PhD at UCL, under the supervision of Prof. Kate E. Jones and Dr. Oisin Mac Aodha. My research focuses on advancing machine learning techniques for acoustic biodiversity monitoring. This includes developing novel methods to identify key acoustic signatures while addressing the challenges of limited data. Before my PhD, I completed a Bachelors and MSc in mathematics.

Complementing my research, I have worked as a data scientist at the Mexican National Commission for Biodiversity (CONABIO) and as a Research Scientist at the Bat Conservation Trust (BCT). At both institutions, I helped build national-scale capabilities for acoustic biodiversity monitoring. This experience has been central in shaping the kinds of applied, large-scale, and conservation-driven challenges I aim to tackle in my academic work.

I am dedicated to open-source collaboration and actively develop software tools for the bioacoustics community. These include an audio annotation tool for machine learning development (whombat), a framework to easily embed ML acoustic detectors into smart bioacoustic devices (acoupi), a bat echolocation detection algorithm (batdetect2), and a library that helps standardise and work with bioacoustic data (soundevent). My current research focuses on developing robust and efficient identification of bat echolocation calls.