Bio

Advisor and Program

Dr. Krishna Pacifici
Geospatial Analytics, NC State University

About

I’m excited to be entering my first year as a PhD student in the Center for Geospatial Analytics at NC State University. My path here has been winding: in undergrad I studied electrical and computer engineering and computer science, and after graduation I spent over four years developing software in the energy industry. Through all this, however, my passion for wildlife conservation has remained strong and ultimately motivated me to shift my career closer to the things I love. I aim to use my technical background to take a quantitative approach to studying wildlife, and I look forward to the opportunity to connect with SE CASC’s partner organizations as a Global Change Research Fellow. My hope is that through new knowledge and irrefutable data on how and why different species have been affected by humans, action can be taken to better preserve and support our few remaining wild places.

Research Interests

My research will focus on understanding how the range and behavior of wildlife are impacted by anthropogenic factors like climate change and habitat loss. I am also interested in developing improved methodologies to make community science data more usable to wildlife managers by better accounting for its biases in modeling. I aim to focus on avian species given that they lend themselves well to answering these questions using interdisciplinary approaches with modern technology and that large-scale datasets tracking populations already exist through community science platforms like eBird.