Alyssa Whitcraft

Alyssa Whitcraft is an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at UMD. Her areas of expertise are broadly related to Earth observation data acquisition, access, and usage requirements for monitoring agriculture in diverse landscapes, including impacts of cloud cover on monitoring, agricultural phenology, and social, political, economic, and technical aspects of EO data adoption for operational agricultural monitoring. She is engaged in capacity development efforts worldwide and has broad interests in increasing equity and diversity knowledge access worldwide. She is also Program Scientist at the GEOGLAM Secretariat, where she works on general program development and coordination in addition to her specific roles as GEOGLAM Point of Contact to CEOS, lead of the EO Data Coordination component, and lead of the Agricultural Monitoring in the Americas Initiative (a regional GEOGLAM network). 

Alyssa received her B.A. from UCLA in Geography/Environmental Studies and International Development Studies, and her Ph.D. in Geographical Sciences at University of Maryland. She comes from a viticultural family and has a personal interest in the sustainability of American viticulture. She firmly believes in intersectionality in all things and brings this lens to her research and management.