Meet the 2026 ESIP Community Fellows

Bobby Saba

COPDESS Cluster

Bobby is a PhD student in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma focusing on severe storms research. His dissertation work includes conducting high resolution simulations to explore storm and tornado dynamics using environments from the Southeast U.S. Bobby is also heavily involved in field efforts with the National Severe Storms Laboratory where he works as a member of the Doppler wind lidar team. This work involves capturing the low-level flow fields in tornadoes as a part of the LIFT project.

Chayan Roychoudhury

Cluster tbd

Chayan is a Postdoc in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. His work focuses on air-quality modeling, Earth system interactions, and integrating observations with models. He has contributed to collaborative efforts related to regional reanalyses and field campaigns. He is passionate about helping researchers navigate Earth science data tools, an interest shaped by his personal experiences learning these systems as an international student. As an ESIP Community Fellow, he hopes to support researchers and students through user-friendly tutorials, resources and workflows to make diverse datasets more accessible.

Gabby Brown

Disaster Lifecycle Cluster

Gabrielle Brown is a PhD student in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on Coastal El Niño and its influence on precipitation anomalies in Peru and Ecuador. She recently completed her master’s degree, during which she developed a framework to examine sources of predictability for extreme events on subseasonal timescales, with an emphasis on regions such as Pakistan and Peru. In alignment with her research interests, she collaborates with climate security teams to assess weather and climate challenges in vulnerable regions worldwide and to help inform climate-security decision making.

Joanna Lumbsden-Pinto

Wildfire Cluster

Joanna is an environmental scientist specializing in forest ecology and vegetation dynamics at the Dovciak Laboratory at SUNY ESF. She investigates how fire regimes and environmental change shape forest ecosystem resilience. Her doctoral research in the Long Island Central Pine Barrens examined how decades of fire suppression have altered vegetation patterns and microclimate conditions in fire-dependent ecosystems, with findings directly informing adaptive management strategies for conservation agencies. Currently, she advances ecological research using quantitative methods to understand how disturbances influence forest dynamics.

Joanna is passionate about utilizing long-term monitoring data and bridging scientific research with community-based conservation by integrating interdisciplinary approaches, including traditional ecological knowledge, into contemporary forest management. She is dedicated to mentoring the next generation of environmental scientists. As a Panamanian scientist, she brings cross-ecosystem perspective and is excited to join ESIP's Wildfire cluster to advance data-driven approaches for understanding and managing fire-dependent ecosystems while making ecological research accessible across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Luana Antunes Alexandre

Envirosensing Cluster

Luana is a Ph.D. student in Earth System Science at Florida International University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Management from the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. Her research focuses on air quality and remote sensing, using Pandora data supported by a NASA-funded initiative. She is a student member of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) at FIU. Luana is also engaged in mentoring and inclusive science outreach with high schools and undergraduate mentorship.

Maddy Allen

Machine Learning Cluster

Madeline is a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University with a long-standing interest in Earth and climate systems. Her work is motivated by a desire to better understand the variability and predictability of hydrologic processes and to advance data-driven methods that support communities and water management decisions. Her research focuses on hydrologic forecasting, including characterizing hydroclimate forecast skill, evaluating the physical plausibility of deep learning model predictions under climate change, and using data augmentation to improve out-of-distribution performance.

She is passionate about open, reproducible science and is excited to be part of the ESIP community – learning from a diverse, collaborative network and contributing to conversations driven by shared curiosity and purpose.

Maddie Berger

Marine Data Cluster

Madeline (Maddie) is a PhD student at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa. Her research focuses on quantifying the spatial and temporal patterns of land-use change at various scales in tropical coastal areas and examining how these patterns relate to marine water quality and nearshore ecological health. She applies geospatial analysis and machine-learning methods to synthesize remotely sensed satellite data, field samples, public records, and other data sources, with the aim of disentangling the drivers of localized impacts on coral reef ecosystems.

Maddie is passionate about reproducible and open science, as well as designing data products that help bridge the gap between research and resource management. Maddie brings an interdisciplinary background to her work, with an M.S. in conservation planning and data science from the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and a B.A. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Rachel Torres

Education Committee

Rachel is passionate about making environmental data science education more inclusive and accessible. She is a postdoctoral scholar with a multi-institutional network developing earth and environmental data science curriculum, collaborating with instructors at Tribal and Community Colleges, and mentoring undergraduate research projects in ecological forecasting. She became interested in teaching and mentorship while working as a teaching assistant for Earth Systems Science during her Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara.