Richard Montes Lemus

Pronouns: he/him

Bio
Richard Montes Lemus’ passion lies at the intersection of machine learning and conservation. As an undergraduate researcher, he worked for the Smithsonian Data Science Lab on optimizing a machine learning model monitoring the Island Spotted Skunk via camera traps on Santa Cruz Island, CA. After graduating, he completed a year-long fellowship at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama as a RaMP-UP Global Sustainability Scholar. There, he developed scripts and a protocol for a physics-based underwater colorimetry model that removes water from underwater reef images. This work allowed him to build reef models with consistent colors across varying water conditions, significantly improving the accuracy of an AI tool used to automate coral bleaching quantification. His project contributed to advancing methods for quantifying coral bleaching at scale through digital reef images.

Now, as a student at Bren School’s Master of Environmental Data Science, he hopes to expand on his programming skills in order to leverage computational tools to address increasingly complex environmental problems. Outside of research, he loves trying different teas, hosting a food systems podcast, and browsing Trader Joe’s. He graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) with a B.S. in Environmental Studies.