Naia Ormaza Zulueta
- Ph.D. Student
Naia is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She focuses on analyzing environmental human rights, while also exploring interests in agriculture and food security. With a background in Physics and Economics, Naia primarily employs quantitative approaches, utilizing tools from statistical learning, scientific programming, and deep learning. The motivation behind her research is to deepen the understanding of how environmental rights violations are distributed and interconnected across the globe—identifying where they occur, how they co-occur, and the ways in which various infringements, such as the right to a safe climate and the right to a non-toxic environment, often overlap and compound in different regions.
Currently, Naia holds experience in both the profit and non-profit sectors, contributing to diverse research projects. From January to April 2024, she worked with CGIAR - CIAT, where she built and designed the analysis for an interactive notebook assessing future heat stress exposure among the agricultural workforce in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to that, she collaborated with the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations, on research and visualization projects, including data gathering for environmental human rights cases such as lead smelting in La Oroya, Peru. She also worked with Bridges to Prosperity by developing a predictive model to identify remote bridge sites in East Africa, helping to combat rural isolation. Additionally, she has also collaborated with Deloitte’s Net Ecological Gain project in Washington State.
Research Interests
Environmental human rights, climate change, food security, agriculture.
Education
- Visiting International Research Student. LUGE Lab, University of British Columbia
- M.Res. Methods and Models of Quantitative Economics, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
- B.Sc. Physics and B.Sc. Electronic Engineering, University of the Basque Country
Faculty Advisors
- Zia Mehrabi
- Steve Miller
Labs