Bio: Hikari Murayama is a PhD Candidate in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she uses remote sensing and machine learning to study the global carbon budget. Her research bridges past and present, from quantifying historical land cover change in Africa using archival aerial imagery to detecting emissions from modern power plants with satellite data. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Hikari has held fellowships at the University of Washington’s eScience Institute as part of the Data Science for Social Good Program in 2020, and at UC Berkeley’s D-Lab from 2020 to 2022. She is currently a Doctoral Fellow at the Global Policy Lab at Stanford University. Her work has been supported by the Quad Fellowship (2024) and the University of California Dissertation Fellowship (2025).

Before graduate school, Hikari worked as a consultant at Bates White Economic Consulting and later led remote sensing projects at NASA DEVELOP, collaborating with conservation groups in Costa Rica. She holds a B.A. in Chemical Physics from Wellesley College.

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