Veda Sunkara

Veda Sunkara, from Los Altos, California, is pursuing a PhD in environment and resources at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She graduated from Brown University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. Veda aims to help develop equitable adaptation solutions to escalating climate change-driven disasters, leveraging remote-sensing and machine learning technologies to empower community-driven resilience. Her work focuses on minimizing harm to frontline communities, using principles of mutual aid and insights from large-scale spatial data to plan for escalating climate extremes effectively. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a senior machine learning engineer at Floodbase (formerly Cloud to Street), where she built machine learning algorithms to create flood maps from satellite imagery, in-situ sensors, and physics-based models for disaster planning and parametric flood insurance.