Team
"Bridging High-Tech Remote Sensing with Ground-Level Climate Action"
PI
Dimitrios Zekkos
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Brief Bio: Dimitrios Zekkos is a Professor at UC Berkeley. He has been working on landfill resiliency and sustainability issues for the last 25 yrs. He serves as the PI of this project.
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Co-PI
Ken Alex
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Brief Bio: Ken spent eight years as a Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Jerry Brown, the Director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, and the Chair of the Strategic Growth Council, focusing on climate, environment, and land use issues. He serves as the Co-PI of this project.
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Co-PI
Riley Duren
Affiliation: Carbon Mapper
Brief Bio: Riley Duren is the CEO of Carbon Mapper and a leading climate scientist dedicated to making methane emissions visible and actionable. He leverages advanced remote sensing technology to bridge the gap between scientific data and climate policy. He serves as the Co-PI of this project.
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Senior Personnel
Amanda Harmon
Affiliation: GTI Energy
Brief Bio: Amanda Harmon is the Director of Zero Emissions Systems at GTI Energy and serves as the Executive Director of Veritas, a leading initiative focused on establishing a standardized, measurement-informed framework for methane emissions intensity.
Senior Personnel
Seth Shonkoff
Affiliation: PSE Healthy Energy
Brief Bio: Seth B.C. Shonkoff is the Executive Director of PSE Healthy Energy, an energy science and policy research institute. He also holds research affiliations at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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Senior Personnel
Barbara Haya
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Brief Bio: Barbara Haya is the Director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. She is a leading expert on the effectiveness and integrity of carbon offset programs.
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Leading researcher and QA Manager
Youngseok Jo
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Brief Bio: Youngseok Jo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley. He focuses on developing next-generation sensing solutions to detect and quantify methane emissions from municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills. His research integrates autonomous terrestrial robots, aerial systems (UAVs), and innovative flux chambers to create "Smart Landfills”. He serves as the QA manager of this project.
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Researcher
Yitong Yang
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Brief Bio: Yitong Yang is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in geoenvironmental and geotechnical engineering. Her research focuses on landfill methane emissions, oxidation processes, and the application of remote sensing and machine learning for environmental monitoring. She works on integrating UAV-based multi-sensing data with advanced modeling approaches to improve the spatial prediction and understanding of methane dynamics in landfill systems.
Researcher
Kristian Hajny
Affiliation: GTI Energy
Brief Bio: Kris is a senior scientist at GTI Energy in the Zero Emissions Systems Team that investigates methane emissions mitigation solutions. His background is in atmospheric science with almost 10 years of experience including both national-scale modeling and facility to regional scale field work focused on understanding the greenhouse gas emissions using airborne measurements.
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Researcher
Eric Lebel
Affiliation: PSE Healthy Energy
Brief Bio: Eric Lebel is a Senior Scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, an energy science and policy research institute. His research focuses on developing and implementing new methods to measure methane and health-damaging air pollutants.
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Researcher
Daniel Cusworth
Affiliation: Carbon Mapper
Brief Bio: Daniel Cusworth is the Director of Science for Carbon Mapper, an NGO with a mission to drive greenhouse gas emission reductions by making methane and carbon dioxide data accessible and actionable. He oversees algorithm development, validation, analysis, and applications of airborne and satellite greenhouse gas datasets. He was formerly a Data Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Research Scientist at University of Arizona and worked on quantification of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions from regional to facility scales.
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Researcher
Tia Scarpelli
Affiliation: Carbon Mapper
Brief Bio: Tia is a research scientist and the Waste Sector Lead for Carbon Mapper. Prior to joining Carbon Mapper, her research focused on using satellite observations and atmospheric modeling to improve greenhouse gas emission inventories. Tia’s current research interests include investigating the characteristics of methane emissions at global landfills and dumpsites, and the role satellite observations can play in informing mitigation of waste sector emissions. Tia also continues to develop the Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) that maps global methane emissions from fossil fuels.
Researcher
Linnan Cao
Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
Brief Bio: Linnan Cao is a Methane Research Fellow at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. Her work focuses on multiple aspects of methane emissions reduction at the local, state, national, and international level, with the intent to move solutions to policy and scale.
