2025 Symposium
2025 Resnick Young Investigators Symposium
The Resnick Young Investigators Symposium celebrates innovators in the science and technology of sustainability. The program highlights young researchers whose work shows great promise in tackling key science and engineering challenges in sustainability.
Friday, May 9, 2025, 10:00 AM - 3:30 PM in Resnick Sustainability Center, room 120
2025 Speaker Lineup
AI-enabled scientific discovery in image collections
About Sara
Sara is an assistant professor at MIT EECS' Faculty of AI and Decision Making and CSAIL, and she was previously a visiting researcher at Google working on Auto Arborist. She's always loved the natural world, and has seen a growing need for technology-based approaches to conservation and sustainability challenges. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including strong spatiotemporal correlations that lead to domain shift, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at Caltech, advised by Pietro Perona, where she received the Amori Doctoral Prize for her dissertation. She has been awarded an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, a PIMCO Data Science Fellowship, an Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her work has been supported by the NSF, NASA, Google, Microsoft, IBM, the USAF, MIT J-WAFS, and the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute.
Approaches and Challenges to Quantifying the Viability of Seaweed Carbon Dioxide Removal
About Daniel
Daniel Dauhajre is a physical oceanographer specializing in ocean modeling. His research explores the dynamics of turbulent ocean flows and waves across multiple scales as well as their coupling to biogeochemistry, kelp forests, and farms. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mapping 20th century urban change by combining aerial photography and machine learning
About Hannah
Hannah is an Assistant Professor of Economics and William H. Hurt Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), University Fellow at Resources for the Future and an affiliate of Caltech's Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy. Hannah's research aims to provide empirically based estimates for the environmental benefits and economic costs associated with natural resource protection. For example, she has work quantifying the flood mitigation value of natural lands, developing new approaches for accounting for ecosystem services in climate policy, and identifying cost-effective climate adaptation solutions.
Mark J. Lara
Assistant Professor, Plant Biology and Geography and Geographic Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Novel Disturbances in the Warming Arctic
About Mark
Mark J. Lara is an Assistant Professor in the department of Plant Biology and the department of Geography and Geographic Information Sciences at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research combines insights and methods taken from plant ecology, biogeochemistry, remote sensing, machine learning, and process-based modeling to address big questions regarding the complex interrelationships governing the fate of carbon and energy dynamics across permafrost landscapes. He received his PhD in Ecology from the University of Texas at El Paso, completed a postdoc within the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and another postdoc within the Plant Biology department at the UIUC prior to transitioning to faculty. Recent awards include the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP Scholar) and the American Geophysical Union's Global Environmental Change Early Career Award.
2025 Program
10:00 AM - Opening Comments
10:10 AM - AI-enabled scientific discovery in image collections
Dr. Sara Beery, Assistant Professor | MIT CSAIL
11:05 AM - Mapping 20th century urban change by combining aerial photography and machine learning
Dr. Hannah Druckenmiller, Assistant Professor of Economics and William H. Hurt Scholar, Caltech
12:00 PM - Lunch Break
1:30 PM - Novel Disturbances in the Warming Arctic
Dr. Mark J. Lara, Assistant Professor, Plant Biology and Geography and Geographic Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2:25 PM - Approaches and Challenges to Quantifying the Viability of Seaweed Carbon Dioxide Removal
Dr. Daniel Dauhajre, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, UC Santa Barbara