Leila Fouda
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Leila grew up in London, England but spent many of the summers of her childhood in Egypt with her family by the ocean. It was there her love of the ocean began and also where she first learned to dive at 13 years old. Leila completed her bachelor’s degree in marine biology at the University of St Andrews in 2009 with a dissertation that investigated the variation in echolocation click characteristics of cetaceans. In 2012 Leila completed an MSc in Conservation Science at Imperial College London where she developed important skills in conservation science practices and conducted a thesis that looked at vessel noise in critical whale habitat in Canada.
Leila completed various marine mammal-focused research assistantships to develop her skillset. Including working on line transects, focal follows, and photo ID of gray whales in Canada and land and boat-based sperm whale surveys in New Zealand. In 2015 Leila won a grant to help develop a photo ID and population ecology study on Australian populations of killer whales at Curtin University (Plos One (2015), Australian Ecology (2020)). As a Research Assistant at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in 2017 Leila investigated the effects of vessel noise on bottlenose dolphin communications (Biology Letters (2018)).
Leila completed her PhD in 2022 as part of the London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership with the Eizaguirre Lab at Queen Mary University of London. Leila’s PhD focused on the foraging and movement ecology of loggerhead sea turtles in the Cabo Verde rookery. Leila examined how foraging preferences impacted maternal health, reproductive output and offspring quality (Ecology and Evolution (2024)). Additionally, Leila used accelerometers and novel GPS tag technology to explore sea turtle movement in the nesting season (coming soon!).
In autumn 2022 Leila moved to the USA to start a postdoc in the Center for Biodiversity and Global Change at Yale University. There Leila focused on understanding the drivers of animal movement on a changing planet using high-resolution global animal movement data to explore habitat preferences around protected areas.
Leila joined the Davies Lab in April 2024 as the Murphy Family Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Ocean Conservation. She is researching how dynamic management practices protect endangered North Atlantic right whales in critical habitats. Her work aims to understand how mitigation measures in dynamically managed conservation areas lead to changes in vessel strike threats in adjacent areas. In addition, she aims to establish how flight behavior and detection ranges of gliders that acoustically detect whales in shipping zones affect the probability of North Atlantic right whale detections.
Outside of her research, Leila loves to read widely (Join her on Storygraph), hike in the beautiful North Atlantic region, try to teach her dog new tricks, and attempt new hobbies such as impov and sailing! You can find out more about Leila on her website. You can also follow her on Bluesky and Linkedin.