Marie L. Urban

Marie Urban leads the Human Geography Group within the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Through development of data-driven, statistical and computational methods, the Human Geography Group seeks to discover new trends and patterns within the sociocultural landscape through population distribution and dynamics modeling at scale.  For nearly 20 years, Marie has been involved in supporting research advancements within the LandScan program through data collection, spatial analysis, and remote sensing methods to improve the spatiotemporal resolution of population estimates at national and planet scale.  In addition, Marie led the development of a global building occupancy probabilistic learning system that captures the local sociocultural and economic building use dynamics contributing to the development of the LandScan high resolution “bottom up” modeling approach for improved reporting of population estimates.