Amanda Hodgson is a Research Fellow at Murdoch University Cetacean Research Unit. Her research interests involve population assessments through aerial surveys and she has been involved in many surveys in Australia and internationally. She has been adapting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) for surveying marine mammal populations for several years, focusing on dugongs and humpback whales, and has developed methods for using UAVs to assess marine mammal abundance and distribution.