AI Linking Climate Change and Biodiversity (Ph.D., in progress)

My Ph.D. project at Mila and HEC Montréal. The scope is still open.

Overview

This is the project I’m starting as a Ph.D. student at Mila and HEC Montréal, with Tegan Maharaj and Olivier Bahn as my advisors. The title is a placeholder. I haven’t fixed the research question yet, and this page will change as the project does.

What I want to work on

Climate change and biodiversity loss are usually studied separately, but they affect each other. A warming climate shifts where species can live. Losing ecosystems changes how much carbon the land and ocean hold. Climate policies have side effects too: a policy aimed at emissions can change land use, and that change reaches habitats that nobody was thinking about when the policy was written.

I want to build AI that makes those connections easier to see. One direction I’m considering is estimating the downstream effects of climate-related policies on biodiversity, so that decision makers can compare options by what they would do to ecosystems as well as to emissions.

Questions I’m starting from

  • How can we combine climate data, species observations, and policy information when each one is incomplete and collected at different scales?
  • How should a model express uncertainty when the data on biodiversity is sparse and biased toward well-studied regions?
  • What kind of output would help a policymaker weigh a decision where a mistake means a lost habitat?

Status

I started in August 2026 and I’m reading and scoping right now. The work is funded by a Canada Impact+ Research Training Award.