In 2024, I co-founded Rhiza Research with two great friends and collaborators, Josh Adkins and Mohini Bariya. Rhiza Research is a nonprofit organization that develops open technology to serve people and the planet. We seek out data, technology, and technical capacity gaps and develop creative, open, and accessible technical solutions to fill these gaps. We are dedicated to working on projects that we believe will have a positive impact on the well-being of ecosystems and communities, from electric grids and climate & weather forecasting, to ecology and music. More on this coming soon.

Before Rhiza, I spent two wonderful years as the Chief Data Officer for nLine. nLine works to improve the reach, reliability, and resilience of the world's most critical infrastructure, starting with power grids. Under-the-hood nLine designs and deploys custom sensors to continuously estimate key performance indicators of critical infrastructure at high-resolution and has been validated at scale in Ghana, Senegal, Kenya, the DRC and Sierra Leone. In my current role as an Energy Systems Scientist for nLine, I continue to lead data- and impact-driven analysis of energy data for investements in energy equity across the globe.

I am a visiting scientist at MIT and recieved my PhD in the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) Joint Program, within the EECS department at MIT. I was a member of the Sensing, Learning, and Inference (SLI) group, advised by John W. Fisher III, within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. For my Master's thesis, I was advised by Yogesh Girdhar in the WARPlab at WHOI and Nicholas Roy in the Robust Robotics Group at MIT.

My research interests are in applications of maching learning to problems of scientific knowledge discovery; so-called "scientific machine learning". During my PhD, I dove deeply into decision-making under uncertainty, Bayesian modeling and inference, and uncertainty quantification, as well as applications of these techniques to marine robotics, subseasonal forecasting, and environmental sensor planning.

My PhD was funded in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. and a PhD research grant from Microsoft Research.

Contact

Email: geflaspohler@gmail.com