Dr. Sassan Saatchi is co-founder and CEO of CTrees, a nonprofit that tracks carbon in every tree on the planet and provides data to governments, companies, and organizations seeking to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation and restore forests at all scales.
Dr. Saatchi is a senior scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and an adjunct professor at the Center for Tropical Research at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. His present research interests include the global carbon cycle, in particular, forest biomass and carbon dynamics; land use and land cover change; forest structure and regeneration; and the impact of climate change and variability on global forest function and resilience. He is currently directing several interdisciplinary research projects on the carbon cycling of tropical forests, particularly in the Amazon and Congo Basin. For NASA’s NISAR and ESA’s BIOMASS satellite missions, he is developing algorithms to retrieve changes of vegetation above ground biomass across different landscapes and ecoregions. Dr. Saatchi received a Ph.D. degree from George Washington University with a concentration in electrophysics and applied mathematics.