Maria João Sousa joins the PiTech Startup Postdoc Runway Program as Executive Director of Climate Change AI
Maria João Sousa
PiTech Startup Postdoc Runway
Maria João Sousa, joins Cornell Tech’s Public Interest Technology Initiative (PiTech) as PiTech Startup Postdoc in the Runway Program. In this new role, Maria will work as Incoming Executive Director at Climate Change AI (CCAI), a global non-profit that catalyzes impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning.
Before joining the PiTech Initiative, Maria pursued her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, in Lisbon (Portugal), which she is set to defend 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.
“Being a systems engineer at heart, I was trained to tackle complex problems and when I decided to do my PhD, I was completely determined to do applied research in an area that could address impactful real-world problems.” For Maria that meant working on addressing wildfires, a pressing societal challenge in several regions worldwide, and particularly in Portugal. “For my work at PiTech and Climate Change AI, my drive continues on the same track, but the purpose of addressing climate change is of course a much broader problem.”
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. Her research was funded by a Ph.D. Scholarship by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), and received seed funding awards from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Humanitarian Grant (RAS-SIGHT) and from NVIDIA Corporation, through the GPU Grants Program.
Prior to joining PiTech, Maria was also serving as Chair of CCAI in a volunteer capacity. She joined the non-profit in 2020 and has since collaborated on and spearheaded several flagship projects of the organization, such as the summer school and the workshop series “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning” at leading AI conferences, e.g., ICML 2021, NeurIPS 2021 (lead organizer), and NeurIPS 2022. During this period she also held organizational and leadership capacities, in activities such as recruitment, and serving as Vice-Chair on the Programs Committee (2021-2022)
Maria received her Master’s of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) at Universidade de Lisboa in 2017. Her specialization area focused on systems, robotics and computational intelligence. During her undergraduate studies, also in Mechanical Engineering, she founded and collaborated in entrepreneurship initiatives at Universidade de Lisboa, including for international programs such as 3 Day Startup.
Maria was born and raised in Braga, a city in the north of Portugal. Before starting her studies in science and technology, most of her school years were spent in the artistic school system dedicated to music education at Conservatório de Música Calouste Gulbenkian de Braga.