Dr. Ahmad Mohassel is a Senior Data Scientist at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), focusing on the intersection of data science and international development. Passionate about the societal impact of climate change, he develops machine learning models using geospatial and remote sensing data to study food security-related topics. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Arizona, concentrating on transportation and environmental economics.

Evaluation officer at the French Development Agency (AFD), I cover the agriculture, biodiversity and WASH evaluation portfolio, with a specialization in impact evaluations. I previously worked on similar subjects for international nonprofits (Innovations for Poverty Action, IDinsight) and the World Bank. I gained interest and expertise in earth observation tools for agriculture with researchers collecting and gathering field data for remote sensing analysis.

Solomon Zena Walelign is a Director of Research at the International Centre for Evaluationand Development. He is also a Consultant at the World Bank, an Adjunct AssistantProfessor at the University of Gondar, and a Research Fellow at Ethiopian Policy Studies Institute. Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkeley andthe University of South Carolina, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagenand Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He completed a double Ph.D. in Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen and in Forest Sciences at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. Solomon’s main research interestincludes livelihoods, poverty, agriculture, natural resource management, migration, landtenure, climate change adaptation and forced displacement. His current researchinvestigates the impacts of refugees on host communities; largescale agricultural landinvestment on local communities; physical infrastructure on nutritious diet, genderempowerment, and equality; and cost-benefit analysis of horticulture production. Hisresearch has been published in World Development, The Journal of Development Studies,Applied Economics Letters, and Ecological Economics, among others. He conductedfieldwork in Nepal, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.

Dr. Kunwar Singh is a Senior Geospatial Scientist at the AidData research lab and an Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Geospatial Analysis at William & Mary. Kunwar has more than 20 years of experience in remote sensing data acquisition, processing, and analysis, including the applications of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and drones to measure, map, and model land characteristics and resources. His research is at the nexus of land change and geospatial sciences where he investigates how the terrestrial system can support future land conversions and resource consumption under a changing climate. He uses geospatial data and technologies supplemented with data from ground observations and weather stations to develop workflows for large spatiotemporal data processing, assess broad-scale land change and its implications to natural resources, and measure outcomes of new adaptations to diminishing natural resources