Maria João Sousa

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT MARIA JOÃO SOUSA

Maria João Sousa is a PiTech Startup Postdoc at Cornell Tech and Executive Director at Climate Change AI (CCAI), which is a global non-profit that catalyzes impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade de Lisboa in 2023. Her doctoral thesis focused on cooperative aerial robotics and artificial intelligence for wildfire detection and monitoring systems and was developed as a research fellow at both IDMEC in the Center of Intelligent Systems and at ADAI in the Forest Fire Research Center.Her research interests are in the areas of computational intelligence, robotics, and networked systems. She was nominated for the UN Environment Young Champions of the Earth 2018 Prize for her project on decentralized intelligent sensor networks for fire detection and monitoring. She has co-organized several entrepreneurship events, including for international programs such as 3 Day Startup. More recently, she collaborated on the NeurIPS 2020 workshop side-event “Monitoring the Climate Crisis with AI, Satellites and Drones” and was on the organizing team of the “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning” workshop at ICML 2021, NeurIPS 2021 (lead organizer), and NeurIPS 2022.