Meghavi Prashnani

Meghavi is South Asia Lead for NASA Harvest and Senior Faculty Specialist at the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland. Formerly, she worked as a Remote Sensing and GIS Expert at Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre, Ministry of Agriculture, New Delhi, where she worked on agriculture monitoring, drought assessment, and crop Insurance using a combination of microwave and optical satellite data and in-situ ground data. She also served North Eastern Space Application Centre, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) as a Scientist, where she worked on different projects of disaster risk reduction, specifically addressing damage caused to agriculture. She worked with high-resolution unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imageries for precision farming and disaster mitigation.  Utilizing Google Earth Engine, she conducted various in-depth time series analyses for examining the evolution of river islands, forest landscapes, and the changing dynamics of water bodies. She worked at the Center for Artificial Intelligence & Robotics, Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Bengaluru (India), where her research focused on evaluating different classification and dimension reduction techniques for the Hyperspectral Imageries. She has traveled pan India for studies and fieldwork.  She loves traveling and exploring new places, which she believes, helps fosters creativity, imparts valuable life lessons, and broadens one's horizons.