Maria João Sousa
Maria João Sousa is a PiTech Startup Postdoc at Cornell Tech and Executive Director at Climate Change AI (CCAI), which is a global non-profit that empowers a global community of innovators, practitioners, and decision-makers to accelerate impactful research and deployment at the intersection of climate change and AI. Since joining CCAI as a core team member in 2020, she has collaborated on and spearheaded several of CCAI’s flagship initiatives e.g., the summer schools, scientific workshops and innovation grants programs. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade de Lisboa in 2023, where her doctoral thesis focused on cooperative aerial robotics and artificial intelligence for wildfire detection and monitoring systems, a project for which she had been nominated for the UN Environment Young Champions of the Earth 2018 Prize.
