Loboda, Tatiana V.

Bio

Tatiana Loboda is a Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park.  She received her B.A. degree in 1995 from the Moscow Pedagogical State University (Moscow, Russia), and her M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2008) degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park. Tatiana’s research interests include wildland fire, biodiversity, climate change, public health and their interactions with other human and physical factors on the landscape. 

Her work incorporates satellite observations of land surface conditions and change to study a variety of science questions ranging from impacts of wildfire on ecosystems and climate to assessing the impacts of conservation policies on poor rural communities to forecasting malaria outbreaks in the tropics. Geographically, her research is mostly focused on boreal forest and tundra biomes, although she has also been involved in studies of temperate and tropical ecosystems.

Dr. Loboda has been an investigator on numerous NASA projects funded by the Terrestrial Ecology (TE), Interdisciplinary Science (IDS), and Land Cover and Land Use (LCLUC) programs. In 2015 she became a Principal Investigator (PI) for the NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) - a major field campaign aimed at developing a better understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of High Northern Latitude ecosystems and society to a rapidly changing environment.  

In parallel, since 2014 she has focused on bridging disciplinary gaps with medical researchers to bring cutting edge remote sensing capabilities into monitoring and forecasting malaria outbreaks in South-East Asia. In 2017 she received a prestigious International Centers of Excellence for Malaria Research (ICEMR) NIH grant as part of a multi-institutional interdisciplinary team of researchers to establish a regional Center of Excellence in Myanmar where she will support the global malaria elimination agenda and build regional capacity in satellite monitoring and remote sensing applications.  

In 2018, Dr. Loboda was named among "Women Leaders in Fire Science" by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.