About me

I am a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, working on deep learning and computer vision for remote sensing.

My research focuses on developing methods that can automatically analyze large-scale Earth observation data to monitor reforestation success in semi-arid regions. These ecosystems face severe land degradation worldwide, leading to food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and increased climate vulnerability. Reforestation offers major ecological and socio-economic benefits, but assessing its success is challenging at scale.

By combining computer vision / deep learning with satellite and drone imagery, my project seeks to create scalable and transferable AI models capable of delivering spatially explicit assessments of vegetation dynamics, biomass, and biodiversity indicators.

This PhD is part of the Leuven.AI initiative and is jointly supervised across three research groups:

• EarthMapps (Prof. Stef Lhermitte)
• Processing Speech and Images (Prof. Matthew Blaschko and Prof. Toon Goedemé)
• Remote Sensing & Terrestrial Ecology (Prof. Ben Somers)