Rate My Professor Beth Tellman

Beth Tellman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at The University of Arizona, holding affiliate faculty positions in Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences and Latin American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from Arizona State University in 2019, where her dissertation leveraged remote sensing data to quantify the role of illicit transactions in urbanization and deforestation in Mexico and Central America. Tellman earned an M.S. in Environmental Science from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2014 and a B.S. in Sustainable Globalization and Environmental Studies from Santa Clara University in 2009. Before joining the University of Arizona in 2021, she served as an Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University from 2019 to 2021, developing satellite-based parametric flood insurance indices for cities and supporting the ACToday initiative in Bangladesh to mitigate flood impacts on food systems. She is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Floodbase since 2015, previously co-founding Cloud to Street, a public benefit corporation using remote sensing for flood mapping and monitoring in low- and middle-income countries.

Tellman's research as a human-environment geographer addresses the causes and consequences of global environmental change for vulnerable populations, specializing in flood risk, land use change, and illicit drivers such as narcotrafficking. Her work employs satellite imagery and machine learning to map flood exposure, validate social vulnerability, and analyze deforestation linked to cocaine production. Notable publications include "Satellite imaging reveals increased proportion of population exposed to floods" (Nature, 2021), "Sen1Floods11: A georeferenced dataset to train and test deep learning flood algorithms for Sentinel-1" (CVPR Workshops, 2020), "Narco-cattle ranching in political forests" (Antipode, 2020), and "Modeling cocaine traffickers and counterdrug interdiction forces as a complex adaptive system" (PNAS, 2019). She has received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2012-2017), Echoing Green Fellowship ($90,000, 2016-2018), Climate Change AI Innovation Grant ($150,000, 2023) for a flood justice project using AI and satellite imagery in Texas, Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst (2023), and Udall Center Policy Fellowship (2023). Tellman's contributions extend to policy through grants, public lectures, and her lab mentoring students on flood adaptation and environmental justice.