Sarah E. Walters

Sarah E. Walters is a Research Scientist with the ORNL Human Geography group and is also PI for the Population Density Tables (PDT) project, a data content management and learning system that supports very high-resolution modeling efforts here at ORNL, as well as meeting the needs and requests of project sponsors.  PDT reports human activity at the building-level, pulling information from a broad range of open-source platforms, to include governmental, NGO, Humanitarian, and academic journals and other educational resources, as well as news outlets, and various social media platforms to include Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, among many others.  Other research that PDT supports includes green building technologies, energy-use, humanitarian aid efforts such as disaster preparedness, response and recovery, and natural hazard loss analysis.

In addition to her direct work with PDT, Sarah is also engaged as the PDT Research Lead for the LandScan project, a global gridded population modeling project, also within the Human Geography group (https://landscan.ornl.gov/).

Her research interests include investigating the intersection of anthropological methods and theory with ongoing population modeling research – understanding the impacts of issues such as perception, bias, and censorship; understanding how people make use of their surroundings and how this is impacted by (and conversely impacts) culture, geography, socioeconomics, and the environment throughout time; how to best predict, identify, and mitigate the impact of social unrest, exploitation, population expansion, and human migration on the preservation and protection of cultural heritage sites; and maintaining purposeful data integration utilizing a mixed-methods research approach. 

Sarah graduated from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016 with a Master’s Degree in Anthropology.  Along with her work and research at ORNL, Sarah is a registered professional archaeologist and is also the flute section head in the Oak Ridge Community Band, an organization she has been involved with for the past seven years.