Isaac Buo is a research staff associate at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI). Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he is developing a novel shade score to quantify where shade is needed in urban areas across the United States. In collaboration with V. Kelly Turner who leads LCI’s heat equity research, Isaac employs LiDAR data and geospatial Python workflows to produce high-resolution shade distribution maps. These shade scores will integrate into the American Forests’ Tree Equity Score Analyzer, enhancing its intervention-planning capabilities to address climate adaptation and historical inequities in heat exposure due to discriminatory land use policies.

Before his role at LCI, Isaac was a specialist in geoinformatics at the Landscape Geoinformatics Lab at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His work focused on harmonizing multi-source spatial data for environmental applications in the European region. 

Isaac holds a PhD in Geoinformatics and a Master of Sciences in Geoinformatics for Urbanized Societies from the University of Tartu, Estonia, along with a Bachelor of Sciences in Geomatic Engineering from the University of Mines and Technology, Ghana. During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting research scholar at the SHaDE lab at Arizona State University.