Closing Remarks – Jennifer Burney (Geo4Dev 2018)

Closing remarks from CEGA affiliate Jennifer Burney at our 2nd annual Geospatial Analysis for International Development (Geo4Dev) conference. Jennifer Burney is an Associate Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) at UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D in Physics from Stanford University. She is an environmental scientist whose research focuses on simultaneously achieving global food security and mitigating climate change. She designs, implements, and evaluates technologies for poverty alleviation and agricultural adaptation, and she studies the links between energy poverty and food and nutrition security, the mechanisms by which energy services can help alleviate poverty, the environmental impacts of food production and consumption, and climate impacts on agriculture. Much of her current research focuses on the developing world.

The 2nd Annual Symposium on Geospatial Analysis for International Development (Geo4Dev) focused on geospatial research that addresses climate- and conflict-driven migration and humanitarian response. This includes observation and modeling of migration and human settlement patterns (in response to climate or conflict stressors), as well as the design and evaluation of interventions for humanitarian crises, mass migration, and community resilience.

Geo4Dev is a yearly event focused on the use of novel geospatial data and analytic techniques to address issues of poverty, sustainable development, urbanization, climate change, and economic growth in developing countries and beyond. This includes a particular emphasis on the use of emerging geo-tagged big data, including satellite, social media, and CDR datasets.