Leona Neftaliem

Urban trees are critical for climate adaptation and human health, but cities often lack detailed information about where trees are, how large they are, and who has access to their benefits. In collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, my work uses deep learning and high-resolution satellite imagery to map individual tree crowns across four North American cities, providing a more complete picture of urban trees and revealing dimensions of inequity that conventional inventories and canopy measures can miss.

Neighborhood-level differences in air pollution are difficult to capture with conventional monitoring networks. In partnership with the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, we built a community-based network of low-cost sensors across Baltimore to understand how pollution and heat vary across neighborhoods and over time. The project shows why that local resolution matters: environmental inequalities can shift across seasons and disappear when data are averaged across larger areas or longer periods.

Climate migration is often framed around exposure to hazards, but people’s decisions about whether to stay or move are also shaped by their relationships with the places they live. With fellow Stanford PhD candidate Sarah Fendrich, I’m leading a national survey across 433 U.S. cities to understand how urban environments, climate risk, and sense of place shape intentions to stay, move within a city, or leave it altogether.

Rapid urban growth is creating major questions about how African cities finance housing, build transportation systems, and govern growth. I helped launch Stanford’s Building Africa’s Cities Summit to bring researchers and practitioners working on these questions together, securing $37,000 across seven partner organizations to support the inaugural convening.

Scientific research has greater public value when people have meaningful ways to engage with it. Working with researchers and educators at the California Academy of Sciences, I developed four live, interactive programs rooted in active Academy research and designed for multigenerational audiences. Each translates current ecological research into a 15-minute facilitated experience and was developed within the Academy’s Transformative Education framework.

I’ve sought out opportunities to understand how environmental research informs policy beyond academia. As a fellow in Stanford’s Rising Environmental Leaders Program, I met with policymakers in Washington, DC and Sacramento to discuss environmental and energy policy. I’ve also contributed scientific expertise through invited review and consultation, including as an expert reviewer for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities and through a United Nations consultation on environmental impact assessment.