Samira Barzin
INTRODUCTION
Samira Barzin is a computational economist who is passionate about generating novel data-driven insight on developing countries crucial for environmental and economic development policy making.
For her work, she creates large databases merging Earth Observation and Big Data with traditional survey data. Her methodological approaches encompass creative combinations of a variety of machine and deep learning algorithms, data science methods, econometrics and statistical techniques. Contextually, her work analyses urban dynamics and environmental parameters in developing countries. Specifically, she focuses on the distributional impact of climate change within and across developing countries (with a focus on countries of Sub-Saharan Africa), and how environmental factors shape cities and urban systems across developing countries.
She is in the process of transitioning to a senior researcher role at the Environmental Change Institute to continue her work on the intersection of development economics and climate change, with the methodological elements of spatial economics and geospatial machine learning.
AREAS OF INTEREST
EO4SDG, AIforGood/ MLforGood, Machine and Deep Learning, Development Economics, Computational Economics, Big Data, Environmental Economics, (Global) Climate Justice, Cities in Developing Countries
RESEARCH GROUPS AND COLLABORATIONS
Samira is a researcher under the Oxford Martin School programme on informal cities and also works with the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.
PUBLICATIONS