Summary
Sara Sayedi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at AidData, housed at the William & Mary Global Research Institute (GRI), and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), where she conducts spatial analysis of water resources in Nepal for the Nepal Water Initiative. The Initiative is a collaborative interdisciplinary effort—between W&M Arts & Sciences, AidData, GRI, the W&M Institute for Integrative Conservation (IIC), VIMS, and Nepalese academic institutions—that seeks to assess environmental threats to the water resources of Nepal under a changing climate and empower conservation leaders to champion community-based conservation efforts for protecting water resources and promoting sustainable livelihoods.
Sara's primary research interests are climate change, geospatial analysis, water security, and decision making under uncertainty. She enjoys interdisciplinary research and exploring the intricate connections between various disciplines to understand how ecosystems and people interact and mutually influence one another.
Education
Ph.D., Wildlife and Wildlands Conservation, Brigham Young University
M.S., Environmental Management, University of Tehran, Iran
B.Sc., Environmental Science, Isfahan University of Technology, Iran
Background
Prior to joining AidData, Sara completed her Ph.D. in Wildlife and Wildlands Conservation at Brigham Young University (BYU). Her dissertation focused on combining expert opinions to assess risks in different Earth systems, with particular attention to permafrost carbon feedback and global fire regimes. Sara has over 10 years of experience in using applied GIS and remote sensing techniques in her work, contributing to projects covering diverse areas such as water quality assessment, vegetation degradation tracking, and air pollution analysis. She has also conducted research on water security, seeking to understand the interaction of land management and climate change on water ecosystem services.