Connecting Space to Village: My Geospatial Journey[s] with the SERVIR Program

Speaker: Dr. Emil Cherrington, Thematic Lead, Ecosystem & Carbon Management, SERVIR Science Coordination Office at NASA; Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Earth System Science Center.

Hosted by the Geospatial Graduate Student Organization and part of GIS Week at NC State.

Summary: Established almost twenty years ago in early 2005, the SERVIR program is a joint initiative of NASA, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and leading geospatial organizations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, focusing on how development challenges can be addressed using Earth observation and geospatial data. This talk will focus on Dr. Cherrington’s literal and figurative journeys with SERVIR, since his joining the program in 2006. He will also share his thoughts on future trends, particularly regarding geospatial artificial intelligence (geo AI).

About the speaker: Emil Cherrington is a Research Scientist at the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and serves as the Regional Science Coordination Lead for West Africa for the SERVIR program of NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He has almost nineteen years of professional experience working with geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing, with his work focusing on the use of such technologies for land cover change detection, ecosystem monitoring, disaster response, and integrated water resource management. He holds a joint Ph.D. in forest ecology (with an emphasis in remote sensing) from AgroParisTech (France) and the Technische Universität Dresden (Germany), under the auspices of a fellowship from the European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus program. He holds a master’s degree in forest resources from the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources (where he was an Organization of American States Fellow) and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Loyola University Maryland.

Recording: https://youtu.be/EZxK16pneoQ