Research satellite remote sensing, causal inference, and spatial statistics to identify where evidence-based interventions can credibly scale
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Most environmental policy evaluations stop at “Did it work there?” I ask: “What physical and social conditions made it work — and where else do those conditions exist?” I develop methods that embed satellite observations directly into causal inference pipelines, enabling credible counterfactual construction and policy transportability analysis—the systematic evaluation of where interventions can scale based on biophysical similarity. |
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Causal inference with satellite data: Embedding satellite-derived representations into causal pipelines to improve donor selection for synthetic control and reduce spatial confounding.
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Policy transportability: Mapping biophysical constraints, assessing spatial heterogeneity in treatment effects, and evaluating institutional feasibility to determine where evidence-based interventions can credibly transfer across regions.
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Remote sensing for environmental policy: Satellite-based water balance modeling, land-use and vegetation change detection, and the use of foundation models (e.g., PrithVi, CLIP) to quantify ecological similarity using multispectral and spatiotemporal data.
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Bayesian decision theory under uncertainty: Hierarchical modeling of spatial heterogeneity, model comparison under heavy-tailed uncertainty, posterior predictive checks, and PSIS-LOO cross-validation to support policy decisions under uncertainty.
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Applied domains: Climate-smart agriculture (e.g., Alternate Wetting and Drying irrigation), prescribed fire management.
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Tran, M.
Satellite-based Control Selection in Synthetic control: A case study in Prescribed burn policy evaluation
Target journal: Journal of Causal Inference -
Tran, M.
Water Balance Suitability Modeling for Spatial Policy Transportation: Satellite-Based Assessment of Vietnam-to-Japan AWD Policy Transfer
Target journal: Agricultural Water Management
- Satellite-based Control Selection in Synthetic control: A case study in Prescribed burn policy evaluation
- Water Balance Suitability Modeling for Spatial Policy Transportation: Satellite-Based Assessment of Vietnam-to-Japan AWD Policy Transfer
- Analyzing government revenue and wage expense of the Government of Argentina
- Anti-dumping duties of Chinese hot-rolled steel
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Email: tran@uni.minerva.edu
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Portfolio: https://mytran-github.github.io/Mee-Chan/