Profile
Isamar Marie Cortés, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, where she works on understanding biodiversity on forest resilience through a combination of field work and remote sensing analysis. She is a physical geographer by training, with emphasis on coupling remote sensing analysis with numerical models to quantify Earth surface processes.
Throughout her career, Isamar has led numerous collaborative projects, including those with NASA, where she analysed changes in mangrove vegetation and tree structure, as well as using Google Earth Engine and other tools for geospatial analysis. She has also received several research grants, including funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation, to advance her studies in climate impacts and ecosystem modelling.
As a leader in the scientific community, Isamar founded the GeoLatinas Coding Group to empower underrepresented groups in Earth sciences, providing a space for learning open-source programming. She has also contributed to science communication initiatives, co-directing the Code to Communicate program, which provides bilingual coding and geoscience training.
In her career, Isamar hopes to continue to understand how climate change will alter tropical forest dynamics and bring this research to local stakeholders.