Lena Ayesh is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina Charlotte, where she completed a triple major in Data Science, Political Science, and International Studies. She is a geospatial intelligence researcher and data scientist: she has conducted fieldwork and language study in Tajikistan and India through the Critical Language Scholarship Program, and has held personal research and analyst positions at the State Department, among other private/public institutions. At UNC Charlotte, she was a Marian Drane Graham Scholar and co-founded and led the Security & Intelligence Student Organization. Most recently, she has served as a Research Assistant at the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland, building AI-powered dataset attribution pipelines for remote sensing imagery. She also completed a co-authored thesis on affective polarization & free speech, drawing on a survey sample of 779 respondents and employing OLS regression, PCA, and qualitative analyses.

Lena received the Fulbright Greece-Turkey Joint Research Award and will be based in Athens and Istanbul, respectively. In Greece, she will be hosted by Emmanuella Doussis, Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and holder of the UNESCO Chair on Climate Diplomacy and Environmental Law. In Türkiye, she will be hosted by Uğur Alganci and Sinasi Şeker at Istanbul Technical University, with additional remote support from Elif Sertel, now at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her nine-month comparative research examines how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and satellite technology can strengthen environmental security, enhance economic resilience, and create technological partnerships between NATO allies Greece and Türkiye and the United States. In Greece, she will analyze Sat4Φorest and the FireHub system, tools that use near-real-time satellite imagery for fire detection, smoke dispersion forecasting, and damage assessment, examining their detection accuracy, response time improvements, and economic benefits for a country where tourism alone accounts for 20% of GDP. In Türkiye, she will study satellite-based forest fire detection and high-resolution land monitoring systems. Across both countries, her methodology combines quantitative satellite data analysis, economic impact assessment, and interviews with 40 to 50 emergency management officials, forestry personnel, and technology developers, with the goal of identifying best practices and informing U.S. foreign assistance priorities and technology transfer decisions in Earth observation.