Anna Zanchetta

anna

Position

Turing Research Fellow

Bio

Anna is a Turing Research Fellow affiliated with the Science for Cities and Regions Programme. In this role, she aims to investigate and generate tools for public good in urban contexts, from supporting environmental sustainability by active modes of transport to applications for humanitarian aid and disaster relief, leveraging on computer vision for earth observation.

During her second year as a Fellow, she is seconded at HOT Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, working on fAIr, their AI-assisted web mapping tool.

She joined the Institute in 2021 as a Post Doc Research Associate within the Urban Analytics Programme, working on the early phase of the national scaling-up of a regional pandemic model, what then became Synthetic Population Catalyst - SPC.

Later she joined the start of a pilot project in partnership with the Geospatial Commission on land use characterisation to support sustainable urban development, where she led the research on computing potential accessibility by different means of transport, basic component of what became Demoland.

Her background is Physics of the Atmosphere and Geomatics, with and MSc and PhD both from Bologna University in Italy. Anna holds a multi-year experience in the Middle East region, where she was involved in activities ranging from water resources and environment management in humanitarian aid projects, to remote sensing and desertification studies in arid and semiarid areas.

Research interests

Anna is interested in geospatial data to tackle inequalities and to promote environmental sustainability, using FOSS tools wherever possible.

She is particularly keen in generating code for reproducible and open science, following the Turing Way principles.