Dr. Ben Strong is the Science and Machine Learning Lead at Earth Genome. In this role, he leads the development of the Earth Index platform, which allows anyone on the planet to quickly search and fine tune models across terabytes of Earth Observation data to monitor relevant environmental trends. He also leads the application of Earth Index in several downstream applications, including Amazon Mining Watch, a cross-sector, multi-institution collaboration exposing illicit and environmentally destructive gold mining within the Amazon. He advocates for nature-centered approaches for AI through his role as XPrize Brain Trust member and other public roles, and he was recently named an inaugural recipient of the Boundless Fellowship in support of “breakthrough leadership for nature.” Prior to his work at Earth Genome, Dr. Strong was a Research Scientist at Google X. He obtained his doctorate in geophysics from Stanford, where he was a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, after earlier receiving a BS in Physics from Yale.
