Dr. Catherine Nakalembe

University of Maryland

Dr. Nakalembe is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Maryland, the Africa Program Director under NASA Harvest, and a member of the NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences Team on which she serves as the Agriculture and Food Security Thematic Lead. She has broad research interests, including satellite remote sensing and machine learning applications to agriculture, land use and land-use change mapping, humanitarian mapping, and climate change. She leads methods and systems development projects for smallholder agriculture in Africa using remote sensing and machine learning. Her work led to developing and establishing satellite data-based crop monitoring initiatives in multiple African countries.

Her honors include a 2022 Golden Jubilee Gold Medal, the Highest Civilian Award of Uganda, awarded by President Yoweri Museveni, the 2020 Africa Food Prize from Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and the 2019 Individual Excellence Award from the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), Geneva, Switzerland.