Tanya Berger-Wolf is a computational ecologist working at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and the social sciences. As Director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State University (TDAI@OSU), she leads efforts to turn data analytics into insight that matters for science and society, and she has become one of the leading voices on AI for ecology and conservation.

Tanya is the co-founder of the Wildbook project and director of Wild Me, the technology for conservation nonprofit behind it. Wildbook applies computer vision and machine learning to image-based biodiversity monitoring: identifying individual animals from camera traps and drone imagery, tracking them over time, and turning photos contributed by researchers and citizen scientists into population-level insight for species conservation. Under her leadership, these platforms have shown how AI can close critical data gaps in ecology and inform real conservation policy.

Her work tackles the hard problems of applying AI in the wild: labeling and class imbalance in sparse ecological data, integrating heterogeneous datasets, model robustness under domain shift, and the ethical questions that arise when technology meets Indigenous knowledge and community science. Through her research, teaching, and advocacy for open data and FAIR principles, Tanya continues to demonstrate how data science and AI can serve both people and the planet.