NASA SARI Core Team Member
Dr.Karen Seto is Associate Dean of Research and Professor of Geography and Urbanization at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Prior to joining Yale in 2008, she was faculty at Stanford University for eight years. She is an expert in urbanization and global environmental change, urban mitigation of climate change, and satellite remote sensing. Professor Seto has pioneered methods to reconstruct historical land-use with satellite data and has developed novel empirical methods to forecast the expansion of urban areas. She has conducted urbanization research in China for twenty years and in India for ten. She was one of the two Coordinating Lead Authors for the urban chapter of Working Group III of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. She has served on many U.S. National Research Council Committees, including the current NRC Committee on Pathways to Urban Sustainability. She is a founder and co-chair of the international project on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC), a core science project of the Future Earth initiative. She is Executive Producer of “10,000 Shovels: Rapid Urban Growth in China,” a documentary film that examines urban changes in China.