Zoey is a data scientist on Dragonfly’s forestry and remote sensing team. She builds deep-learning models for tasks such as canopy height prediction, tree segmentation, and species classification, and contributes to the MBIE-funded project with NASA to model forest structure from satellite, airborne, and other data.
Zoey grew up in Shandong, China, and completed a Bachelor of Digital Media Technology and a Master’s in Computer Application Technology. Her early research used AI for image processing in areas such as autonomous driving and safety monitoring. She came to Aotearoa for a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington in the Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, within the Evolutionary Computation Research Group. Her thesis work used deep learning for forestry—tree-crown detection, segmentation, and species classification, in collaboration with Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research.
In her final PhD year Zoey worked part-time at Callaghan Innovation on applied AI projects, which reinforced her interest in industry-facing work. She had followed Dragonfly’s forestry AI work and got in touch even when there wasn’t an open role; a few months later, things lined up and she joined the team.
Zoey values Wellington’s work–life balance and the chance to keep doing work that closely matches her PhD while contributing to environmental science.
It’s a perfect fit for me. The work is so similar to my PhD, and it feels meaningful. I feel really fortunate to be working in this role.
Welcome Zoey Sun has more on her path to Dragonfly.