People

Ben Koger - PI

Email: bkoger@uwyo.edu

Github: https://github.com/benkoger

Ben Koger is an assistant professor in the School of Computing and the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming. His work focuses on creating systems that allow for the efficient and automated study of ecological systems. Specifically, combining imaging and computer vision to monitor populations and study the relationship between individuals and their social and physical landscapes. His current research focus is building novel methods to monitor wildlife in the American West and pacific salmon migration and behavior in Alaska. Previously, he was a Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington working with Professor Andrew Berdahl. During his Ph.D. he worked with Iain Couzin at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in the Department of Collective Behaviour in Konstanz Germany. He completed his bachelors degree in electrical engineering at Princeton University where he focused on image processing and machine learning.

Owen Martin - Research Scientist

Web: https://owingit.github.io/

Github: https://github.com/owingit

Owen Martin received his Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from Tufts University and his PhD in Computer Science 2025 from University of Colorado, Boulder in the Peleg Lab at the BioFrontiers Institute. Prior to his Ph.D., he spent several years working as a software engineer in test for Hitachi Vantara in Boston and NetApp Solidfire in Boulder before pivoting to academia to ask his own questions. During his Ph.D., Owen researched collective behavior and swarm computation with the Peleg lab. In the Koger Lab, his focus is designing landscape scale computer vision aerial survey systems for monitoring pronghorn and other large bodied animals as well as researching collective behavior in natural landscapes. His research interests broadly span synchronized North American fireflies; group cognition in bees; and social behavior in multi-species foraging flocks of birds, and he programs agent-based models of these systems informed by field data to simulate and ask questions of their behavior.

Michael Lance - Undergraduate Researcher

Github: https://github.com/MikeL270

Michael Lance is a a student in the University of Wyoming’s School of Computing in the Applied Software Development program. He earned his Associates of Applied Science in Computer Technology from Central Wyoming College in 2024. In the Koger Lab his focus is building a full stack web tool for training and using deep learning models in the context of aerial wildlife surveys. He enjoy problem solving and working with his hands. He is restoring a 1976 Ford f150 Custom Cab 300i6 in his spare time.