Education
- PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at Caltech
Experience
Dr. Beery is an assistant professor at MIT EECS’ Faculty of AI and Decision Making and CSAIL, who was previously a visiting researcher at Google working on Auto Arborist. She has always loved the natural world, and has seen a growing need for technology-based approaches to conservation and sustainability challenges. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including strong spatiotemporal correlations that lead to domain shift, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at Caltech, advised by Pietro Perona, where she received the Amori Doctoral Prize for her dissertation. She has been honored to be awarded an AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, a PIMCO Data Science Fellowship an Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Dr. Beery’s work has been supported by the NSF, NASA, Google, Microsoft, IBM, the USAF, MIT J-WAFS, and the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute.
In her work, she seeks to break down knowledge barriers between fields: She founded the successful AI for Conservation slack community (with over 2500 members), She is Co-PI on the NSF/NSERC Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, and is the Biodiversity Community Lead for Climate Change AI, She works closely with industry, including the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Microsoft AI for Good, Google Research, Wildlife Insights, and Wild Me where she helps turn her research into usable, deployed tools.
Selection Publications
Harnessing artificial intelligence to fill global shortfalls in biodiversity knowledge
Laura J Pollock*, Justin Kitzes*, Sara Beery, Kaitlyn M Gaynor, Marta A Jarzyna, Oisin Mac Aodha, Bernd Meyer, David Rolnick, Graham W Taylor, Devis Tuia, Tanya Berger-Wolf
Nature Reviews Biodiversity 2025
[paper]
Do Large Language Model Benchmarks Test Reliability?
Joshua Vendrow*, Edward Vendrow*, Sara Beery^, Aleksander Madry^
[paper] [webpage]
Generative AI as a tool to accelerate the field of ecology
Kasim Rafiq, Sara Beery, Meredith S Palmer, Zaid Harchaoui, Briana Abrahms
Nature Ecology & Evolution 2025
[paper]
Personalized Representation from Personalized Generation
Shobhita Sundaram*, Julia Chae*, Yonglong Tian, Sara Beery^, Phillip Isola^
ICML 2025
[paper] [webpage]
The Potential for AI to Revolutionize Conservation: A Horizon Scan
Sam A Reynolds, Sara Beery, Neil Burgess, Mark Burgman, Stuart HM Butchart, Steven J Cooke, David Coomes, Finn Danielsen, Enrico Di Minin, América Paz Durán, Francis Gassert, Amy Hinsley, Sadiq Jaffer, Julia PG Jones, Binbin V Li, Oisin Mac Aodha, Anil Madhavapeddy, Stephanie AL O’Donnell, William M Oxbury, Lloyd Peck, Nathalie Pettorelli, Jon Paul Rodríguez, Emily Shuckburgh, Bernardo Strassburg, Hiromi Yamashita, Zhongqi Miao, William J Sutherland
Trends in Ecology & Evolution 2024
[paper]
