Karen Seto (GRS’95, GRS’00) arrived at Boston University in 1992 with aspirations of becoming a foreign service officer. Drawn to BU’s international relations program and its roster of former ambassadors, she envisioned a global diplomatic career.
But a single class—natural resource economics with Professor Robert Kaufmann—changed everything. That course, followed by a transformative remote sensing class with Professor Curtis Woodcock, opened her eyes to a new way of seeing the world—literally.
“It was transformative to see the world from space,” Seto recalls. “I remember seeing a satellite image of Hong Kong, where I was born, and being amazed that you could see the differences between Hong Kong and China.” That moment sparked a lifelong fascination with remote sensing and urbanization.
Today, Seto is one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of contemporary urbanization on the planet. She developed the first global forecast of urban expansion, and—using a combination of satellite remote sensing, modeling methods, and fieldwork—her research has advanced understanding of urbanization’s effects on climate change, biodiversity, and food systems. In recognition of her groundbreaking contributions to urban science and her enduring impact on global environmental research, she will be honored this fall with a 2025 BU Arts & Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award.
“I’m humbled and really honored,” says Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at Yale University. “BU was such an exciting place and the faculty—these two professors—literally changed my life.”
After that class with Kaufmann, Seto switched to an interdisciplinary graduate program, earning an MA in international relations and resource and environmental management, followed by a Ph.D. in Geography at BU, with Kaufmann and Woodcock as her co-advisors. Her dissertation focused on urbanization in China, a topic she chose because of the dynamic spatial changes unfolding there.
“BU Geography at that time was an incredibly exciting place intellectually. It was one of the leading remote sensing centers in the world, and I was one of the few people using satellite data to study urbanization at the time,” she says. “At the same time, there were also economists, political scientists, ecologists in the department. It was an incubator for novel science.”
Over the past 30 years, Seto has pioneered the use of satellite remote sensing to understand how cities, especially those in the Global South, grow and how that growth affects the demand for energy, materials, and land, while transforming habitats, agricultural lands, and carbon stocks. Her work has taken her across Asia, with over two decades of fieldwork in China, more than a decade in India, as well as projects in Nepal, Qatar, and Vietnam. She has served as Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th and 6th Assessment Reports, co-chaired the National Academy of Science’s Climate Security Roundtable, and co-founded the international science program Urbanization and Global Environmental Change.
In 2012, her lab produced the first-ever global, spatially explicit forecast of urban expansion and its potential effects on carbon stocks—a milestone in a global change and urban science. And in 2012, along with several collaborators, she developed a new theoretical framework—urban land teleconnections—to understand how urbanization affects the world. This work and related studies have placed urbanization on international science agendas such as The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an international organization committed to strengthening the role of science in public decision-making on biodiversity and ecosystem services, Seto says.
“Conventionally, the environmental effects of urbanization are thought to be primarily local or regional. Our framework helps to understand that cities affect places far from them through the demand for resources to build and power cities,” she explains. “Now that concept is widely understood. But when we published this paper, it was the first to really develop this framework—that the aggregate effects of urbanization are global in scope. In other words, urbanization is not only a local issue. It’s also a global issue.”
Seto’s accolades include election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of awards from the American Association of Geographers and the Ecological Society of America. At Yale, she teaches courses on urbanization and sustainability, urban mitigation of climate change, and advanced remote sensing. In addition, she directs Yale’s Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability and co-directs the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions.
And as the world becomes increasingly urban, Seto continues to be inspired by new questions—and the new tools and methods to answer them. “The questions I’m asking now are different from the ones I asked during my Ph.D.,” she says. “We’re experiencing a geospatial data revolution with thousands of new satellites being launched. At the same urbanization is a bigger trend today than ever, especially in Africa and South Asia. There are new questions emerging. That’s what inspires me.”
Yet what excites her most today is mentoring. “I’m entering a different phase in my career,” she says. “I get more joy from mentoring students and postdocs and seeing them succeed.” Her former mentees now work at NASA, in academia, and at startups around the world, and she is “proud that they have been able to pursue things that are intellectually interesting to them,” she says.
For Seto, the Distinguished Alumni Award is not just an honor—it’s a full-circle moment of gratitude and inspiration.
“I’m a testament to the power of great professors,” she says. “We all have that faculty member who inspires us. Now, more than 25 years after finishing my Ph.D., I still think about the lessons I learned from each of them. They transformed my life.”