Ms Sera Tolgay

Sera Tolgay Marshall is an urban planner and hydrologist focused on climate adaptation, infrastructure planning, and water management. Sera has a decade of professional experience in engineering and planning firms, including as a Project Manager at SCAPE in New York City, where she led award-winning nature-based infrastructure projects in flood-prone communities. As a researcher at NASA’s Applied Earth Science DEVELOP Program, her team developed South Africa’s first national freshwater ecosystem map using remote sensing to support conservation efforts. As a National Geographic Explorer, she has received grants for watershed restoration and post-disaster rebuilding and has worked as an independent consultant for the World Bank and UN-Habitat.

After many years in professional practice, Sera is currently pursuing doctoral research in Engineering at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, studying how extreme events like droughts and floods impact transboundary watersheds using satellite data to guide adaptive land use and water conservation strategies. Her research focuses on geopolitically sensitive regions, like the Tigris-Euphrates basin, supporting resilient water management in data-scarce, climate-vulnerable regions. She holds a BA from Yale University, Master in City Planning from MIT, and an MS in Hydrology from the University of Oklahoma.