Senior Fellow at WorldPop, University of Southampton. She/Her.
Heather is a Senior Fellow with the WorldPop Research Group at the University of Southampton, UK. Her work focuses on integrating geospatial datasets and quantitative spatial methods for population estimation and high-resolution mapping of sociodemographics and population health. Most recently she has focused on population estimation and mapping through the GRID3 project, collaborating with project partners in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Numerous efforts have been made to map people and structures. These include “traditional” efforts from US and EU research and government institutions and crowdsourced efforts like OpenStreetMap. Recently, we’ve seen the addition of massive AI-derived open building datasets from Meta and Google and the launch of the Overture Foundation. How do these efforts compare? How can they build off each other? How should we get them into use by National Statistics Offices and government decision-makers?
