Dr Emmanuel Dufourq, accepted the appointment as an AIMS Canadian Junior Research Chair in Climate Science in August 2021. He holds this position jointly with a position at Stellenbosch University as a data science lecturer (50% allocated to the Department of Industrial Engineering and 50% to the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking).

From Mauritius, he obtained a Bachelor’s degree (Computer Science & Applied Mathematics) from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2012, graduated Summa Cum Laude Honours (Computer Science) in 2013, obtained a Master’s degree (Computer Science) in 2016 under the supervision of Prof Nelishia Pillay and obtained his PhD (Applied Mathematics) from the University of Cape Town in 2019 under the supervision of Prof Bruce Bassett. His doctorate focused on evolutionary deep learning which included evolutionary algorithms for text compression, sentiment analysis, facial emotion recognition and neural network optimisation.

He pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at AIMS South Africa from 2019 to 2021. He obtained various grants to work on machine learning for conservation ecology and supervised several students in this field. His primary focus is on passive acoustic monitoring of various critically endangered species around the world including the world’s rarest primate.