Dr. Karen Seto

Biography

Karen Seto is a prominent urban land change scientist and one of the world's leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global environmental change. Her research employs a combination of field surveys, satellite data, and numerical modeling to understand how urbanization affects the planet. Over the past two decades, Seto has conducted extensive research on urbanization in China and India. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use from satellite imagery and developed innovative ways to forecast urban expansion. Seto's work has generated significant new knowledge linking urbanization with land use, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change. She has served on several national and international scientific bodies, including co-leading the urban mitigation chapter of the IPCC's sixth Assessment Report and previously co-leading a chapter in the fifth Assessment Report. From 2014 to 2020, she was the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Global Environmental Change. Prior to her appointment at Yale, Seto was on the faculty at Stanford University, holding joint appointments at the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She has received several awards for her scientific contributions and was named a “Highly Cited Researcher” in 2018, 2019, and 2020, acknowledging her research papers ranked in the top 1% for total citations across fields. Seto is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, as well as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research Interests