About

Andy Chamberlin, research data scientist at Stanford: drone and satellite mapping, computer vision and spatial modeling for disease ecology and the environment.

I’m a research data scientist at Stanford University in Disease Ecology in a Changing World (DECO), a research initiative of the Stanford Center for Human and Planetary Health co-led by Giulio De Leo and Erin Mordecai. I also work closely with Joelle Rosser’s lab on dengue. On most of our projects I lead the drone and remote sensing work, from study design through published maps.

What I do

I work across the whole arc of a project:

• Shaping the questions and writing the grants
• Designing studies and planning drone missions
• Processing and calibrating drone and satellite imagery
• Building computer vision models that pull features out of that imagery
• Analysis and modeling
• Presentations and papers

Methods

• Imagery: drone mapping, multispectral and spectral analysis, radiometric calibration, satellite imagery and Google Earth Engine
• Terrain and water: elevation models, hydrological modeling and flow routing
• Computer vision: deep learning to detect objects and map land cover, testing models in new places, scaling drone results up to satellite
• Statistics: spatial statistics, machine learning, Bayesian inference, species distribution models
• Tools: Python, R, QGIS, GPU model training on Stanford’s computing cluster

Collaborators

This work depends on field teams, labs and partners in Senegal, Brazil, Kenya, Indonesia and Costa Rica, and on the scientists who lead these projects.

Background

• B.S., Biology, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• FAA Part 107 remote pilot; private pilot license
• Consultant to Conservation International, mapping water-management infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa (2019–2020)
• French and Spanish
• Field photography and video