Congratulations to Liza Goldberg, a graduate of CDDRL's 2023-24 Fisher Family Honors Program, on her selection as a 2025 Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Knight-Hennessy Scholars cultivates and supports a multidisciplinary and multicultural community of graduate students from across Stanford University and delivers engaging experiences that prepare graduates to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world.

Originally from Columbia, Maryland, Liza “is pursuing a PhD in Earth System Science at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. She received a bachelor’s degree in Earth Systems at Stanford University and a master’s degree in climate change and planetary health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Liza pairs satellite remote sensing and qualitative analysis to build climate change resilience in settings of poverty and humanitarian emergencies, especially across South Asia. She has worked as an earth scientist at NASA since age 14 and has presented her published research worldwide. As a National Geographic Explorer, Liza founded and directs a global initiative to build remote sensing capacity in low-resource institutions across climate front lines. She leads an international team leveraging space technology to monitor the Rohingya refugee crisis and preserve multigenerational refugee histories.”

Liza is a Marshall Scholar, a Google Developer Expert, and a Sigma Squared Fellow. In 2024, she was inducted into the academic honors society Phi Beta Kappa.

At CDDRL, Liza received the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for her honors thesis, “The Psychology of Adolescent Poverty Under Climate Change: Evidence from Bangladesh,” based on extensive fieldwork and groundbreaking research into gender and climate adaptation. When asked what initially attracted her to the Fisher Family Honors Program, she shared at the time: “I am excited to have the opportunity to formally cross my interests in climate science and development policy through this program. I have also been very fortunate to receive extensive mentorship from my two CDDRL advisors throughout my time at Stanford, and I very much look forward to continuing to work together, as well as with the entire outstanding CDDRL faculty group, throughout the course of writing my thesis.”

Regarding her future aspirations post-Stanford, Liza shared upon her acceptance into the Fisher Family Honors Program, "I seek to dedicate my education and career to applying groundbreaking satellite technology in aiding climate adaptation across low- and middle-income nations."

You can read the full Knight-Hennessy Scholars press release here.