Sara Beery is an assistant professor at MIT EECS's faculty of AI and Decision Making and CSAIL. She was previously a Visiting Researcher at Google, working on Auto Arborist. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including strong spatiotemporal correlations that lead to domain shift, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions.

Sara received a PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at Caltech, where she received the Amori Doctoral Prize for her dissertation and was awarded both the PIMCO Data Science Fellowship and the Amazon AI4Science Fellowship. Her work has been funded in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute. She is the Biodiversity Community Lead for Climate Change AI and the founding director of the Caltech Summer School on Computer Vision Methods for Ecology. Sara works closely with Microsoft AI for Earth, Google Research, and Wildlife Insights; helping turn her research into usable tools for the ecological community.

Sara is passionate about increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM through mentorship, teaching, and outreach. Her DEI efforts have been recognized with the inaugural Caltech Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department Gradient for Change Award and the inaugural Caltech Engineering and Applied Science Division New Horizons Award.