Tanya O'Garra
Senior Research Associate in Sustainability AI, Head of Sustainability AI Hub
Profile
Dr Tanya O’Garra is an interdisciplinary researcher specialising in causal evidence for conservation and sustainability decision-making. Her research focuses on identifying the causal impacts of complex environmental interventions – particularly in biodiversity and nature conservation, but also across wider sustainability decision contexts - and on understanding the mechanisms through which these interventions generate environmental and social outcomes.
At the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Dr O’Garra works at the interface of artificial intelligence and causal inference. Her primary goal is to integrate AI-enabled data sources and derived environmental variables with emerging AI-supported causal attribution methods to identify what works in conservation and sustainability, and to make explicit the mechanisms and assumptions underpinning these impacts.
She has extensive experience leading and contributing to applied impact evaluations in conservation and sustainability, working closely with NGOs and practitioners across diverse contexts. Her work spans fisheries and marine conservation, community-based natural resource management, and urban sustainability, with a consistent emphasis on linking evidence to real-world decisions.
Dr O’Garra has held academic and research positions at the National University of Singapore, Imperial College London, Middlesex University London, and Columbia University, and received her PhD from Imperial College London. She is President of the Society for Conservation Biology’s Impact Evaluation Working Group, a Visiting Reader at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College, and an Associate Editor of Conservation Science and Practice.
