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 has 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 my dissertation. She has been awarded an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Grant, 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.
Sara is joining the AMS Institute as a principal investigator for the joint research initiative between MIT and AMS: Senseable City Amsterdam.