Barbara Metzler, PhD

I am a Senior Data Scientist at BBC Verify, where I use satellite imagery, geospatial data and open-source techniques to investigate and verify news stories.

My background is in remote sensing and AI, with experience in foundation models across text and vision. I’ve worked with open-source satellite data like Copernicus Sentinel, plus high-resolution radar and optical imagery for detailed analysis. Shortly before joining BBC Verify, I was a founding engineer at a geospatial tech startup. Before that, I was a researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, where I worked on projects including:

• Are you smarter than a foundation model? (online game)
• DemoLand
• EuroFab

I obtained my PhD at Imperial College London as part of the Global Environmental Health Research Group and the Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities collaboration. My PhD research focused on characterising urban development with high-resolution satellite imagery and self-supervised deep learning in Sub-Saharan Africa.

news