Ran Goldblatt, Ph.D., is a Remote Sensing Scientist and a senior consultant at New Light Technologies. Ran joined the company after completing three years as a postdoctoral researcher and a lecturer at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. He completed his Ph.D. in Geography and the Human Environment at Tel-Aviv university, Israel, where he also earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees (both with distinction). His research interests lie in the area of remote sensing and geospatial analysis at scale, and in utilizing Remote Sensing tools to understand the relation between LCLU changes and economic development, primarily in developing countries. He has collaborated with researchers in multiple disciplines and industries, including consulting to several divisions at the World Bank on utilizing remotely sensed data for economic applications and led several workshops of remote sensing analysis, both in the US and in Vietnam. In the past few years Ran has been involved in a broad array of research projects spanning many disciplines, including mapping the world's built-up environment, understanding industrialization processes in developing countries, measuring land degradation in the semi-arid tropics and developing remote sensing tools for monitoring coral bleaching events.
Ran was part of the founding team that established the Big Pixel Initiative at UC San Diego, which became known as one of the leading academic centers for scalable remote sensing analysis and research on geospatial big data. He is the author of more than 15 peer-reviewed academic papers, served as a member of conference and workshop program committees and has been an invited speaker to several conferences on geospatial science.