ARE Alumnus Dan Hammer Launching Environmental Storytelling App With Access To Global Satellite Images

June 27, 2018

ARE alumnus Dan Hammer PhD '18, a former senior policy advisor in President Obama's White House and at NASA, is profiled for a partnership his nonprofit Earthrise Media is launching with National Geographic and the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose to develop an environmental research and teaching app. Called the Earthrise Media Storytelling app, it will file large amounts of satellite imagery in a database for high school students to use in investigations of environmental trends, including drought and deforestation. "If hundreds of thousands of kids are using or engaging with changes that occur on the earth's surface, we can help teach the computer to find those (changes)," he says. "We can start reporting from changes on the earth's surface without ever having a human look at it." Hammer is a former fellow at the Berkeley Institute of Data Science, a cofounder of The Earth Genome, and winner of the 2017 Pritzker Prize for the Environment.