Google Earth Engine GDE Liza Goldberg uses tech to fight climate change
Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Developer Relations Program Manager
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| Liza Goldberg, Google Earth
GDE |
Google Earth Engine GDE Liza Goldberg uses tech to fight climate
change
Liza Goldberg learned to code through Google Earth Engine at age fourteen, when her
mentors at NASA, where she was an intern, introduced the tool as a way to model global trends
in environmental change. Liza, who had arrived at NASA with no coding or remote sensing
experience, gradually gained expertise in the platform, thanks to strong mentorship, Google
training, and guidance from the Google Earth Engine developer community. The fact that Google
Earth Engine is built for scientists and has a clear world impact aligned with Liza’s
commitment to using technology to combat climate change.
“Earth Engine enabled me to write each line of code knowing that my algorithms could
eventually make true change in climate monitoring,” she says. “The visualization-focused
interface of Earth Engine showed me that coding could be simple, data focused, and broadly
influential across all fields of climate science.”
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Liza Goldberg speaking at the Geo
for Good Summit
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Becoming a GDE
Liza
used Earth Engine for years at her NASA internship, which grew into a part-time research
position. In 2022, her longtime collaborator on the Google Earth Engine team, Tyler Erickson,
nominated Liza for the GDE Program, and she became a GDE in April 2022.
“When I found out about my nomination, I felt admittedly nostalgic,” she says. “I
remembered my 14-year-old excitement when I first opened Earth Engine – how the whole world
suddenly seemed open to me. Becoming a GDE felt like coming full-circle; in many ways, I grew
up with Earth Engine.”
Liza hopes her GDE role encourages other young
students to explore new technologies.
“I hope that my position as a GDE
can show other young students - particularly women - that starting with no knowledge of a
field doesn’t need to be a barrier towards accomplishing your ultimate goals,” she says. “As
the youngest female GDE in North America, I hope to break the barriers that prevent other
young women from chasing down their passions in male-dominated arenas.”
In her GDE role, Liza is collaborating with Google India and the Indian Institutes of
Technology (IIT) to launch a series of Google Earth Engine trainings across the country,
building technical capacity among the next generation of climate scientists.
“We’ll be guiding students in basic geospatial skills, preparing them for
fellowships with partner conservation organizations in the coming year,” she says. “I’m
optimistic that this program can distribute the advanced computing power of Earth Engine to
students who can leverage its tools for local-to-national scale change.”
Working at NASA
Liza has continued her longtime work on global mangrove ecosystem
vulnerability at NASA, analyzing the impact of various mangrove protection and governance
models on the degree of forest disturbance. Liza is spending the summer in West Africa with
her NASA colleagues, completing mangrove-based fieldwork and delivering Google Earth Engine
trainings to academic and conservation institutions in the area.
Liza
is also currently leading The Atlantis Project, a global initiative to enable the Earth’s most
climate vulnerable populations to develop community disaster response capacity, at NASA.
“We’re using Google Earth Engine to map the key barriers toward a
community’s recovery from impending climatic disasters, enabling aid organizations to more
effectively target the right stressors in the right communities,” she says. “We’re currently
training highly flood vulnerable communities in early warning system deployment and household
disaster preparation and response.”
Her team is also collaborating with
NGOs in India to educate communities on their post-disaster aid rights.
Studying at Stanford
Liza is also a college student, studying Earth Systems and international
development policy at Stanford University.
“I seek to better
understand how climate change can further trap the extreme poor in cycles of lagging economic
growth,” she says. “I will then combine my remote sensing knowledge with this policy and
climate change background to develop new solutions for climate adaptation across the
developing world.”
Ultimately, Liza seeks to use technology to help the
planet’s most climate-vulnerable populations respond most effectively to climate impacts.
“I’ve found that satellite analysis is among the most effective ways
to tackle many of these challenges, but I’ve fallen in love with the problem, not any
particular solution to it,” she says. “In my professional future, I seek to continue applying
satellite tech towards building these critical bridges between technical capacity and
on-the-ground need.”
Learn more about Liza on LinkedIn.
The Google Developer
Experts (GDE) program is a global network of highly experienced technology experts,
influencers, and thought leaders who actively support developers, companies, and tech
communities by speaking at events and publishing content.
