about me

I am a PhD candidate in the Earth System Science department at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. I am part of the EchoLab and lucky to be advised by Marshall Burke. I am supported by a Stanford Data Science Fellowship and the Ram and Vijay Shriram Sustainability Fellowship. In the past, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago, working at the Climate Impact Lab. In a previous life, I was a Data Scientist at DSaPP (now @CMU), and a research analyst at the Central Bank of Colombia.

research interests

I evaluate the effects of environmental changes on humans. I also develop machine learning models to create cool datasets that help us track humans and nature in data-scarce scenarios. I am interested in downscaling climate data products, multi-modal classification, measurement error in causal inference models, and wildfires in the Western US.

news and updates

publications, working papers & workshops

 

1. Higuera-Mendieta, I, Wen, J., & Burke, M. (2023). A table is worth a thousand pictures: Multi-modal contrastive learning in house burning classification in wildfire events. NeurIPS 2023 Computational Sustainability: Promises and Pitfalls from Theory to Deployment.

2. Farah, A., Higuera-Mendieta, I, Song, Y., Franke, J. A., Moyer, E., & Nakamura, N. (2020). Arctic airmass displacement and reduced midlatitudes wintertime temperature variability under climate change. [In preparation for Geophysical Research Letters].

3. Rodolfa, K. T., Salomon, E., Haynes, L., Higuera-Mendieta, I, Larson, J.,& Ghani, R. (2020). Case study: Predictive fairness to reduce misdemeanor recidivism through social service interventions. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (142–153). FAT* ‘20

4. Bonilla-Mejia, L., & Higuera-Mendieta, I. (2019). Protected Areas under Weak Institutions: Evidence from Colombia. World Development, 122