Daniel J. Varon
Principal Investigator
Boeing Career Development Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Daniel Varon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT. He received his PhD in atmospheric chemistry from Harvard University in 2020 and held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs from 2020 to 2025. He is Model Scientist of the Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI), Co-Nested Model Scientist of the GEOS-Chem global chemical transport model, and Associate Editor for the Atmospheric Measurement Techniques journal of the European Geosciences Union.
dvaron@mit.edu
Tai-Long He
Postdoctoral Researcher
Tai-Long He is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT. His research focuses on the introduction of air pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the impact of emissions on atmospheric chemistry and climate, and the variability of emissions. He utilizes observational data, physics-based modeling, and machine learning to detect sources of air pollutants from aircraft and satellites.
tlhe@mit.edu
Kevin Gauld
Graduate Student Researcher
Kevin Gauld is a graduate student in MIT AeroAstro. Before arriving at MIT, he received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. His research has focused on the use of high-resolution imagery data to build environmental understanding in fields spanning robotics, medical engineering, planetary science, and astronomy. Previously, he was a science team researcher with NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer mission, developing geospatial corrections for downlinked images. Currently, he is developing methods for reconstruction of pollutant plumes from high resolution hyperspectral imagery.
kgauld@mit.edu
Vassiliki (Viki) Mancoridis
Graduate Student Researcher
Vassiliki Mancoridis is an MS/PhD student in MIT’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department and a 2024-2028 DOE CSGF scholar. She is working at the intersection of geospatial machine learning and greenhouse gas detection, and her current research focuses on improving methane detection and quantification using multispectral satellite imagery. Before coming to MIT, she received a Bachelor in Science and Engineering in Computer Science from Princeton University.
vm8@mit.edu
Lab Affiliates
Ye Seul Cho
Postdoctoral Associate, University of Maryland
Ye Seul Cho received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Atmospheric Sciences from Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, in 2018 and 2024. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC), University of Maryland. Her research focuses on developing satellite-based retrieval algorithms for methane using broadband sensors such as VIIRS and deep learning approaches. During her Ph.D., she improved aerosol retrieval algorithms for the Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS).
yscho@umd.edu
Lucas Estrada
Graduate Student Researcher, Harvard University
Lucas Estrada is a PhD student in Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University, co-advised by Daniel Jacob and Daniel Varon. His research focuses on developing and applying data-driven methods to estimate methane emissions using satellite observations. Prior to his graduate studies, he worked as a scientific programmer and software engineer after earning a BA in Geoscience and Computer Science from Williams College.
lestrada@g.harvard.edu