Derek Van Berkel

Dr. Van Berkel is an assistant professor at The University of Michigan, School for Environment and Sustainability. His research focuses on understanding land change at diverse scales; the physical and psychological benefit of exposure to natural environments; and how digital visualization of data can add new place-based knowledge in science and community decision-making. He has expertise in spatial statistics, data science, big data, and machine learning. Van Berkel is currently a Co-PI on an NSF grant examining how online webtools can enable the public to co-create landscape designs for novel solutions to climate-change adaptation and mitigation in urban areas. He is also part of the NOAA funded GLISA project developing land change models to support knowledge discovery in municipalities throughout the Great Lake States. His work in AI focuses on deciphering complex sentiment from multimodal content, such as understanding image content and analyzing captions and tags posted by users, at scale. This research aims to provide objective measures of behavior and attitude for modeling diverse values and benefits of nature globally.

Accomplishments and Awards

• Great Lakes cities could become destinations for climate change migrants