Professor Jasmeet Judge

Principal Investigator GALUP 1-Land Use Planning

Dr. Jasmeet Judge is Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Director of the Center for Remote Sensing at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on remote sensing applications in agricultural hydrology. She uses remote sensing data, along with crop growth and data fusion algorithms to quantify in-season soil water and crop conditions at various spatial scales. She has led collaborative field experiments and projects that involve microwave and optical remote sensing models for growing crops, causal linkages among land uses, and water resource management.

Dr. Aditya Singh

Principal Investigator GALUP 2-Land Degradation

Dr. Aditya Singh is an Assistant Professor of Remote Sensing in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Florida. His research focuses on using satellite and airborne remotely sensed optical data to assess ecosystem structure, composition, and function. A former Urban and Regional Planner, Aditya has previously researched links between socio-economic dynamics and land cover change in South Asia. He leads the land use land cover mapping and modeling team in the GALUP project. 

Foster Mensah

Co-Investigator

Based in Accra, Ghana, Foster Mensah  is the Executive Director of Centre for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services (CERSGIS), a Geo-information Services and Research Support Centre based at the University of Ghana. He is a geo-information specialist with professional experience in land use/land cover mapping from remotely sensed imagery GPS mapping and spatial modelling.

Dr. Samuel Kobina Annim

Co-Investigator

Dr. Samuel Kobina Annim is the Government Statistician for Ghana and a Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He focused his research on concentration on Micro Development Economics and Applied Microeconometrics at the Department of Economics, University of Cape Coast, Ghana.

Dr. Changjie Chen

Co-Investigator

Dr. Changjie Chen is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) at the University of Florida. He is a planner and statistician whose research emphasis is directed at the simulation of future land-use scenarios and transportation modeling by integrating spatial analytics, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms.

Dr. Olivier J. Walther

Co-Investigator

Dr. Olivier J. Walther is an Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Florida and an affiliated researcher at the UF Sahel Research Group. His research and teaching focus on the development of cross-border trade and the emergence of transnational political violence in West Africa. Dr. Walther’s work combines geographic information systems, social network analysis, statistical analysis and qualitative interviews. He has conducted fieldwork in Niger, Nigeria, Benin, Mali, Mauritania and Ghana.

Professor Gregory Kiker

Collaborator

Dr. Gregory Kiker  is Professor in agro-ecological modeling and decision analysis of coupled natural-human systems in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Florida. He has worked widely over southern, eastern and western Africa with emphasis on sustainable  human/environment interactions.  His simulation modeling research covers a wide variety of topics from savanna ecosystems to agro-pastoral systems, water resources, climate change, food value chains and resilient  infrastructure.

Dr. Rachata (Chot) Muneepeerakul

Collaborator

Dr. Rachata (Chot) Muneepeerakul is an Associate Professor in complex system modeling at the University of Florida. His primary investigative tools are mathematical and computational models—dynamical models, complex networks, game theory, and stochastic processes. Dr. Muneepeerakul’s research focuses on systematic development of models of coupled natural-human systems. He is involved in a number of transdisciplinary research projects with topics ranging from vulnerability arising from interdependence in economic networks, resilience of water-subsidized systems, resilience of livestock trade networks, human migration and environmental changes.

Dr. Kwadwo Owusu

Collaborator

Dr. Kwadwo Owusu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Geography and Resource Development of the University of Ghana. His areas of teaching and research interests are climatology, climate variability and climate change. He studies their impacts on agriculture and water resources, with particular focus on smallholder adaptation to climate change. Dr. Owusu has worked on many international research projects geared towards improving smallholder farmers’ resilience to the negative impact of climate changes on agriculture and rural livelihoods.