Stella is a DRIP Ph.D. scholar supervised by Dr. Daniel Masiga (icipe). Her research interest concentrates on using time-series satellite data to understand and monitor landscape dynamics and to assess how these changes affect and or influence the distribution of other living organisms such as insects, wild animals, humans among others. Stella is also passionate about technological skills that encourage the processing and analysis of large satellite and geospatial datasets in cloud-based platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE). Her present research combines remote sensing data, geostatistical sciences, field observations and modelling to bring a spatial understanding of the risk of trypanosomiasis transmission in cattle. Stella’s research outputs will likely impact the design of control strategies at local levels where the most impact is probable.

Stella holds a Bachelor of Science in Geospatial Information Science from the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Kenya, a Master of Science in Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation in Natural Resources Management from the University of Twente (ITC) in The Netherlands. She is currently enrolled as an external Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program of the Natural Resources under the theme Forest Agriculture and Environment in Spatial Sciences (FORAGES) at the University of Twente (ITC) under the supervision of Prof. A.K. Skidmore. Stella is also a member of the British Ecology Society (BES), London United Kingdom.