A photo of me

Mads O’Brien is an interdisciplinary environmental professional with over 8 years of GIS and remote sensing experience. She is passionate about advancing satellite imagery’s role in natural resource management and climate change mitigation, as well as low-cost and crowdsourced solutions to environmental data collection.

Currently, she serves as a Technology Officer with FSC Investments & Partnerships, a mission-aligned nonprofit working closely with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Previously, Mads was a Senior Geospatial Analyst for MethaneSAT, LLC, where she primarily wrangled oil and gas industry data in order to attribute methane emissions to their sources around the world. Before that, she worked as a research assistant at the United States Geological Survey’s California Volcano Observatory, and as a GIS tutor at Stanford University.

Outside of her formal career, she has lived the life of a property manager, a volunteer geophysicist, a student government representative, a camp counselor, an actor, and a nonprofit board member.

:mailbox: email me: m.obrien (at) fsc (dot) org

View my resume Connect on LinkedIn

Education

:mortar_board: MESc, Yale School of the Environment 2020
Environmental Science
Thesis: UAV deployment for fine-scale CO2 estimation in a mid-size city

:mortar_board: BA, Wesleyan University 2016
Earth & Environmental Science, Science in Society

I am currently…

:house: Living in Silicon Valley
:telephone_receiver: Open for networking calls
:v: Not seeking new opportunities
:books: Reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
:owl: Striving towards a 1,000-day Duolingo streak

(last updated January 30, 2026)

About this website
Static site generated with Jekyll, using the open-source website theme portfolYOU (plus some tinkering in HTML, Bootstrap, and Liquid by me). P.S. Click the sun/moon in the menu bar to change the site theme!