Sonya Sachdeva

Sonya Sachdeva is Director of Wildfire Science at Overstory, where she leads wildfire risk modeling that integrates satellite imagery, remote sensing, and geospatial analysis to help utilities mitigate wildfire risk. She came to this work after more than a decade as a Research Social Scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, where she applied machine learning and NLP to some of the thorniest questions in natural resource management: how people perceive environmental risk, how moral and cultural values shape conservation behavior, and how communities relate to the lands around them. That career-long interest in the human side of environmental systems now infuses her approach to wildfire science, where data only matters if it connects to how people actually make decisions. Sonya holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Northwestern University, and her work has always sat at the intersection of how we think, what we value, and what we're willing to do about the world we share.