Karen C. Seto

Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science

Faculty Director, Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability

Faculty Co-Director, Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions

Karen Seto is the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at the Yale School of the Environment. Her central research focus is how urbanization will affect the planet. She is one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global change. A geographer and urbanization scientist, she is an expert in satellite remote sensing, and has pioneered methods to reconstruct historical urban land-use and developed the first global forecast of urban land expansion. 

Seto is a specialist in contemporary urbanization in Asia, especially China and India, where she has conducted research for over 20 and 10 years, respectively. Her research is notable for its systematic use of big data and a scientific lens to study urbanization as a process and to understand the aggregate global impacts of urbanization. Seto’s research has generated new insights on the interaction between urbanization and food systems, the effects of urban expansion on biodiversity and cropland loss, urban energy use and emissions, and urban mitigation of climate change. 

Professor Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies. She co-lead the urban mitigation chapter for two United Nations climate change reports, the IPCC 6th (2022) and 5th (2014) Assessment Reports. She co-founded and for ten years co-chaired an international science program, Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC), which framed, enabled, and coordinated urban environmental research with more than 1,000 affiliates across over 50 countries. She has served on numerous U.S. National Research Council (NRC) Committees, including the NRC Committee to the Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the NRC Committee on Pathways to Urban Sustainability. She was the Executive Producer of “10,000 Shovels: Rapid Urban Growth in China,” a documentary film that integrates satellite imagery, historical photographs, and contemporary film footage to highlight the urban changes occurring in China.

From 2000 to 2008, she was faculty at Stanford, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Foreign Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She holds a PhD in Geography from Boston University. 

Education