Sara Beery has spent her life leaping between worlds—from a professional ballet stage to a computer lab, and now to the frontlines of biodiversity science. This month, the ABC Global Center researcher and MIT assistant professor earned a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to further her mission: teaching artificial intelligence to understand nature—at scale.

Awarded $600,000 over five years, Beery’s project, “A Computer Vision for Global Biodiversity,” tackles one of conservation’s thorniest problems: too much data, not enough experts. With images streaming in from drones, satellites, camera traps, and citizen scientists, the wild world is more photographed than ever—but analyzing those images remains a massive bottleneck.

That’s where Beery’s expertise kicks in. A faculty member in MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and core collaborator at the NSF/NSERC-funded ABC Global Center, she builds AI tools to spot rare species, adapt to unfamiliar environments, and make sense of messy, incomplete, or long-tailed data. In other words: she’s building computer vision that can do fieldwork.

The NSF CAREER Award supports three intertwined goals: improving how AI recognizes rare or even unknown species; creating models that quickly adjust to new regions or data streams; and building tools that merge multiple data types—from satellite photos to acoustic recordings—into one coherent ecological picture.

“Nature doesn’t operate in neatly labeled datasets,” Beery said. “We need models that can learn from the real-world messiness that ecologists face every day.”

Beery's work is deeply aligned with the ABC Global Center’s mission of using AI to address climate-driven biodiversity change. She’s also the Biodiversity Lead for Climate Change AI, co-PI of the Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, and founder of the 2,500-member AI for Conservation Slack community. Her projects are already helping global partners—from NASA to Wildlife Insights—turn raw data into action.

From mentoring students to launching workshops that unite ecologists and coders, Beery is as committed to breaking silos as she is to breaking new scientific ground. With the CAREER award, her vision—to make biodiversity data both accessible and actionable—is one step closer to reality.

Turns out, teaching AI to understand nature might just take the heart of a dancer and the mind of a scientist.