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Karen C. Seto

Frederick Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science, Yale University, School of the Environment

Karen Seto is one of the world's leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global change, pioneering methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and to forecast urban expansion. Her research focuses on the links between urbanization and land use, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change. Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies and is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Global Environmental Change. Prior to joining Yale, she was on the faculty at Stanford from 2000 to 2008, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She earned a PhD in geography from Boston University.