Meet our Team

Kidia Gelaye

Kidia Gelaye is the Science and Data Lead for SERVIR West Africa Phase II. His role is supporting West Africa regional partners in enhancing awareness and accessibility to geospatial data and providing technical and scientific support for valuable user-driven services, data, models, and tools. Before joining SERVIR West Africa, Kidia was an assistant professor at the University of Gondar in Ethiopia. He has extensive expertise in agriculture water management, mitigating soil salinity in irrigated lands, irrigation design and planning, irrigation’s environmental impacts, and data science. Kidia is keenly interested in ecological big-data science, cloud computing, and remote sensing and machine learning applications in water and agriculture. Kidia has contributed to peer-reviewed publications. He received his Ph.D. in Agricultural Water and Environment from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, Austria.

Bouba Traore

Garba Boulamine Mounkaila

Garba, is an environmental agronomist, an expert in Remote Sensing & Geographic Information System (GIS) and drone operations. In this program, he uses his expertise to deploy and improve Earth Observation (EO) workflows through data procurement, curation, pre-processing, post-processing as well as uncertainty estimation, interoperability and quality of service.  In doing so, his research contributes to understanding different types of remote sensing data needed for different types of services (including the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud resources, incorporation of innovations and emergent promising methodologies in service workflows). Garba also ensures compliance with open science & open data principles, making sure that scientific rigor in the development of EO-based services is observed. With all this scientific background, Garba is set to facilitate science interactions between all partners of SERVIR and support the program in the coordination of scientific publications on peer peer-reviewed journals.