Dr. Alexandra (Sasha) Tyukavina is an Associate Research Professor at the Department of Geographical Sciences. She is originally from Russia, and received MSc in Cartography in 2011 from Lomonosov Moscow State University. Sasha's Master's thesis was focused on mapping the northernmost forests in the world (Ary-Mas forest island). She received her Ph.D. in 2015 from the UMD Department of Geographical Sciences under the supervision of Prof. Matthew Hansen. Her dissertation research was investigating forest disturbance dynamics in the humid tropics using optical and Lidar remotely sensed data sets.

During her postdoctoral research, Dr. Tyukavina was working primarily on sample-based estimation of forest loss drivers in the tropics. Since then her focus shifted to characterizing global drivers of forest loss and global sampling methods for accuracy assessment and area estimation. Sasha has published the first global map of forest loss due to fire in 30m resolution. She has lead a NASA-funded research project quantifying the global hotspots of forest loss and their drivers using high resolution data. Sasha's contributions to the field have been recognized with a 2022 Leading Women in Machine Learning for Earth Observation (ML4EO) Award from the Radiant Earth Foundation.

Since 2021 Dr. Tyukavina has been serving as a co-lead of the Land Cover focus area within the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Land Product Validation (LPV) subgroup. In this role Sasha has initiated the update of the global land cover validation guidelines, which has been last performed in 2006.

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZjLPnXcAAAAJ&hl=en