Kelsey Josund

Machine Learning Engineer, Pachama

Online

Kelsey Josund is passionate about nature, innovation, and storytelling — so communicating how technology can help solve climate change is her favorite thing.

Raised by an eco-builder and forest conservation fundraiser, she’s been involved with environmental causes since childhood. While at Stanford University, she led the solar car team, racing an experimental solar-powered electric vehicle across the Australian Outback in 2015 and 2017. She then graduated with a BS and MS in computer science. After college, she worked at Tesla and Pilot AI on firmware and computer vision, before joining Pachama to bring machine learning into the forest carbon offset space. Pachama is a fast-growing startup that uses satellites, forest inventory data, and modern machine learning to verify carbon credits and bring transparency to the nature-based carbon credit industry.

Kelsey spends her workdays training machine learning models to predict biomass from satellite data and her evenings writing novels. Her first book, Platformed, is a near-future dystopia about a climate change-embattled Silicon Valley. It came out in 2021.