Karen C. Seto

Education & Curriculum Vitae

B.A. University of California, Santa Barbara
M.A., Ph.D. Boston University

About

Karen Seto is the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science. An urban and land change scientist, she is one of the world's leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global change. Her research focus is how urbanization will affect the planet. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and has developed novel methods to forecast urban expansion. She has conducted urbanization research in China for twenty years and in India for more than ten. Her research has generated insights on the links between urbanization and land use, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change.

Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies. She is co-leading the urban mitigation chapter for the IPCC 6^th Assessment Report and co-lead the same chapter for the IPCC 5^th Assessment Report. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Global Environmental Change. From 2000 to 2008, she was faculty at Stanford, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She has received numerous awards for her scientific contributions, including the Outstanding Contributions to Remote Sensing Research Award from the American Association of Geographers. Seto is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She earned a PhD in Geography from Boston University. 

Courses